CVE-2017-9778

medium

Published 2017-06-21 · Modified 2026-05-13

💬 Discuss on Community ✚ Propose mitigation

CVSS v3

5.5

CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

5.5

Description

GNU Debugger (GDB) 8.0 and earlier fails to detect a negative length field in a DWARF section. A malformed section in an ELF binary or a core file can cause GDB to repeatedly allocate memory until a process limit is reached. This can, for example, impede efforts to analyze malware with GDB.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

55%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

OS impact

OS	Version	Status	Fixed in
sles		affected
debian	bookworm	fixed	`8.3.1-1`
debian	bullseye	fixed	`8.3.1-1`
debian	forky	fixed	`8.3.1-1`
debian	sid	fixed	`8.3.1-1`
debian	trixie	fixed	`8.3.1-1`

Application impact

Vendor	Product	Versions	Fixed
gnu	gdb	`{"endIncluding":"8.0"}`

References

CWEs

CWE-20 CWE-770

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.