Denial of Service (DoS) The advisory has been revoked - it doesn't affect any version of package elfutils  (opens in a new tab)


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EPSS
1.6% (75th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-CONAN-ELFUTILS-10075557
  • published8 May 2025
  • disclosed29 Jan 2019
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 29 Jan 2019

CVE-2019-7148  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-770  (opens in a new tab)

Amendment

This was deemed not a vulnerability.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). An attempted excessive memory allocation was discovered in the function read_long_names in elf_begin.c in libelf in elfutils 0.174. Remote attackers could leverage this vulnerability to cause a denial-of-service via crafted elf input, which leads to an out-of-memory exception. NOTE: The maintainers believe this is not a real issue, but instead a "warning caused by ASAN because the allocation is big. By setting ASAN_OPTIONS=allocator_may_return_null=1 and running the reproducer, nothing happens."

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

References