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.
Severity
CVSS 3.0
5.5 medium
CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS
2.3% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days; higher than 83% of CVEs (scores of 2026-10-31)