Vulnerability · Published Sep 22, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M
CVE-2026-81885radare2: Infinite relocation-chain loop causes denial of service in radare2 NE parser
Medium 5.5
In plain English
A medium-severity resource allocation without limits in radare2 from radareorg. Proof-of-concept exploit code is public. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.2% (higher than 6% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
radare2 is a UNIX-like reverse engineering framework and command-line toolset. Prior to 6.2.0, radare2's NE relocation fixup-chain parser was vulnerable because the NE relocation parser followed fixup chains without an active iteration limit or cycle detection. The vulnerability is triggered by opening a crafted NE executable whose in-bounds relocation entry points back to itself instead of reaching 0xffff. The parser repeatedly processed the same relocation and allocated another relocation object on each iteration. This can cause denial of service through continuous CPU and memory consumption. This issue is fixed in version 6.2.0.
Affected packages & fixed versions
| Ecosystem | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu:26.04:LTS | radare2 | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-81885 |
| Ubuntu:26.10 | radare2 | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-81885 |
Affected products (as reported)
Weakness: CWE-770, CWE-835 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
References
- https://github.com/radareorg/radare2/security/advisories/GHSA-43wr-4j49-rcxj x_refsource_CONFIRM
- https://github.com/radareorg/radare2/issues/26225 x_refsource_MISC
- https://github.com/radareorg/radare2/pull/26192 x_refsource_MISC
- https://github.com/radareorg/radare2/commit/93d794caa7c2f08413106255d49546e544c1f9f0 x_refsource_MISC
- https://github.com/radareorg/radare2/releases/tag/6.2.0 x_refsource_MISC