CVE-2017-9778: GNU Gdb

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 1.1% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

GNU Debugger (GDB) 8.0 and earlier fails to detect a negative length field in a DWARF section. A malformed section in an ELF binary or a core file can cause GDB to repeatedly allocate memory until a process limit is reached. This can, for example, impede efforts to analyze malware with GDB.

Affected products

• GNU Gdb: up to and including 8.0

Published 2017-06-21. Last modified 2026-06-17.