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Fencer Intel
medium 5.5

CVE-2017-9778 json

GNU Debugger (GDB) 8.0 and earlier fails to detect a negative length field in a DWARF section.

published 2017-06-21 9 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2017-18708

cvss
5.5
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.1%
EPSS 1.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 66%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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.

Patch / fix

  • gdb Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 8.3.1-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2017-9778

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-2017-9778 updated cvss 3.3

gdb: Malformed section in an ELF binary or a core file can cause memory exhaustion

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 gdb Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 gdb, gdb-gdbserver Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 gdb, gdb-gdbserver
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”

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

1.11% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 66% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 5.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:L/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-20 Improper Input Validation
  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

References

Sources

Fencer Intel 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.