CVE-2018-18606: Debian Linux

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 2.3% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

An issue was discovered in the merge_strings function in merge.c in the Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (aka libbfd), as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.31. There is a NULL pointer dereference in _bfd_add_merge_section when attempting to merge sections with large alignments. A specially crafted ELF allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service, as demonstrated by ld.

Affected products

• Debian Debian Linux: version 7.0 only; version 8.0 only; version 9.0 only
• GNU Binutils: version 2.31 only
• Netapp Data Ontap: affected versions not specified

Published 2018-10-23. Last modified 2026-06-17.