CVE-2021-20197
Published: 26 March 2021
Summary
CVE-2021-20197 is a medium-severity Link Following (CWE-59) vulnerability in Gnu Binutils. Its CVSS base score is 6.3 (Medium).
Operationally, ranked at the 29.9th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2021-7643
Vulnerability details
There is an open race window when writing output in the following utilities in GNU binutils version 2.35 and earlier:ar, objcopy, strip, ranlib. When these utilities are run as a privileged user (presumably as part of a script updating binaries…
more
across different users), an unprivileged user can trick these utilities into getting ownership of arbitrary files through a symlink.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Likely Mitigating Controls AI
Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.
Accurate timestamps from internal clocks enable detection of race conditions by providing reliable event ordering in audit logs.
Coordination of concurrent security activities reduces the probability that shared resources will be accessed simultaneously without proper synchronization.