CVE-2025-69651: GNU Binutils

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

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 products

• GNU Binutils: up to and including 2.46

Published 2026-03-06. Last modified 2026-06-17.