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Fencer Intel
medium 5.5

CVE-2026-81885 json

radare2: Infinite relocation-chain loop causes denial of service in radare2 NE parser

published 2mo ago modified last mo. also EUVD-2026-84471 , GHSA-43wr-4j49-rcxj

Unreviewed: the maintainers' own advisory

Published by the maintainers on their GitHub repository radareorg/radare2. GitHub has not reviewed it into the GitHub Advisory Database, so the affected packages and versions are the maintainers' word. Read the full advisory on GitHub.

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 5%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

radare2 is a UNIX-like reverse engineering framework and command-line toolset. Prior to 6.2.0, radare2's NE relocation fixup-chain parser was vulnerable because the NE relocation parser followed fixup chains without an active iteration limit or cycle detection. The vulnerability is triggered by opening a crafted NE executable whose in-bounds relocation entry points back to itself instead of reaching 0xffff. The parser repeatedly processed the same relocation and allocated another relocation object on each iteration. This can cause denial of service through continuous CPU and memory consumption. This issue is fixed in version 6.2.0.

Patch / fix

  • radare radare2 6.2.0
  • radare2 openSUSE Leap 16.0 6.2.2-bp160.1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2026:21988-1

Is CVE-2026-81885 in your stack? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

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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-2026-81885 updated cvss 5.5

radare2: radare2: Denial of Service via infinite relocation-chain loop

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    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

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
Proof of concept is public
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
last mo.

Exploit prediction

0.17% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 5% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-11).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/radareorg/radare2/issues/26225 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected products

  • radareorg radare2

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
  • CWE-835 Loop with Unreachable Exit Condition

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.

The maintainers of radareorg/radare2 published their own advisory on GitHub. Reviewed sources take precedence over it.

CPEs and fixed versions use Anchore's correction of NVD's data: Added CPE configurations because not yet analyzed by NVD.