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Fencer Vulns
medium 6.5

CVE-2019-7148 json

An attempted excessive memory allocation was discovered in the function read_long_names in elf_begin.c in libelf in elfutils 0.174.

published 2019-01-29 7 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2019-16698

cvss
6.5
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.6%
EPSS 1.6% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 75%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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."

Patch / fix

  • elfutils Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 0.176-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2019-7148

  • dwarves SLE Module for Basesystem 15 SP3, SLE Micro 5.2, SLE Micro 5.1 +2 more 1.22-150300.7.3.1
  • elfutils SLE Module for Basesystem 15 SP3, SLE Micro 5.2, SLE Micro 5.1 +2 more 0.177-150300.11.3.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2022:2614-2SUSE-SU-2022:2614-1

  • elfutils Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +10 more 0.176-r0

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2019-7148

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • libelf Arch Linux 0.176-1

arch linux advisories AVG-863

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2019-7148 updated cvss 3.3

elfutils: excessive memory allocation in read_long_names in elf_begin.c in libelf

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 elfutils Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 elfutils, elfutils-libs, elfutils-libelf Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 elfutils, elfutils-libs, elfutils-libelf, elfutils-default-yama-scope Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 elfutils, elfutils-libs, elfutils-libelf, elfutils-default-yama-scope
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

1.60% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 75% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • sourceware.org https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=24085 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 6.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 4.3 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.