Cyber Resilience

CVE-2021-3549

High

Published: 26 May 2021

Published
26 May 2021
Modified
28 February 2025
KEV Added
Patch
CVSS Score v3.1 7.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0035 57.5th percentile
Risk Priority 14 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Summary

CVE-2021-3549 is a high-severity Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer (CWE-119) vulnerability in Gnu Binutils. Its CVSS base score is 7.1 (High).

Operationally, ranked in the top 42.5% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability details

An out of bounds flaw was found in GNU binutils objdump utility version 2.36. An attacker could use this flaw and pass a large section to avr_elf32_load_records_from_section() probably resulting in a crash or in some cases memory corruption. The highest…

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threat from this vulnerability is to integrity as well as system availability.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.

Affected Assets

gnu
binutils
2.36

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.

addresses: CWE-119 CWE-787

Memory protections (e.g., W^X, ASLR) make exploitation of buffer-boundary violations far harder to turn into code execution.

addresses: CWE-119

Ongoing control assessments and code testing (static/dynamic analysis, fuzzing) surface memory buffer restriction failures, which are then remediated before release.

addresses: CWE-119

Managed runtimes used by platform-independent applications (e.g., JVM, CLR) enforce memory safety, preventing most buffer overflows that require direct memory manipulation.

addresses: CWE-119

Detects exploitation attempts that produce memory corruption, crashes, or anomalous behavior.

References