CVE-2020-21047 Memory corruption in n/a

Medium 5.5 Published 22 Aug 2023 Updated 14 Oct 2026

Attackers can cause denial of service in elfutils by crafting malicious ELF files that trigger out-of-bounds writes and assertion failures.

Exploited in the wild: Not known
Login needed: Not needed
Attackable: Local or same network only
Victim action needed: A user has to click or open something
Fix: Available

What is CVE-2020-21047?

CVE-2020-21047 is a medium-severity memory corruption vulnerability in n/a, published on 22 Aug 2023. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

The libcpu component which is used by libasm of elfutils version 0.177 (git 47780c9e), suffers from denial-of-service vulnerability caused by application crashes due to out-of-bounds write (CWE-787), off-by-one error (CWE-193) and reachable assertion (CWE-617); to exploit the vulnerability, the attackers need to craft certain ELF files which bypass the missing bound checks.

Weakness: CWE-787

Which versions are affected by CVE-2020-21047?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Elfutils Project Elfutils.

How do I fix CVE-2020-21047?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade to the fixed version. Memory-safe languages, compiler hardening and fuzzing prevent most new cases. More about Memory corruption.

Is CVE-2020-21047 being exploited?

It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2020-21047 exists.

Sources

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2020-21047, DLA-3579-1, GHSA-q33x-5cf5-cqqv, UBUNTU-CVE-2020-21047.