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Vulnerability · Published Mar 6, 2026 · Assigned by mitre

CVE-2025-69651

Medium 5.5

In plain English

A medium-severity null pointer dereference in the binutils package (Debian). Proof-of-concept exploit code is public. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.3% (higher than 20% of all known vulnerabilities). Fixed versions are available - upgrade the affected package.

Severity (CVSS 3.1)5.5Medium
Exploit odds (30 days)0.3%top 80.1% of all CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: poc
Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

GNU Binutils thru 2.46 readelf contains a vulnerability that leads to an invalid pointer free when processing a crafted ELF binary with malformed relocation or symbol data. If dump_relocations returns early due to parsing errors, the internal all_relocations array may remain partially uninitialized. Later, process_got_section_contents() may attempt to free an invalid r_symbol pointer, triggering memory corruption checks in glibc and causing the program to terminate with SIGABRT. No evidence of further memory corruption or code execution was observed; the impact is limited to denial of service. NOTE: this is disputed by third parties because the observed behavior occurred only in pre-release code and did not affect any tagged version.

Affected packages & fixed versions

EcosystemPackageFixed inAdvisory
Debian:12binutilsno fix listedDEBIAN-CVE-2025-69651
Debian:13binutilsno fix listedDEBIAN-CVE-2025-69651
Debian:14binutils2.46-1DEBIAN-CVE-2025-69651
Ubuntu:22.04:LTSbinutilsno fix listedUBUNTU-CVE-2025-69651
Ubuntu:24.04:LTSbinutilsno fix listedUBUNTU-CVE-2025-69651
Ubuntu:25.10binutilsno fix listedUBUNTU-CVE-2025-69651

Affected products (as reported)

VendorProductVersions
n/a n/a n/a

Weakness: CWE-476 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

References