What is CVE-2017-14974?

CVE-2017-14974 is a medium-severity vulnerability in GNU Binutils, classified under NULL Pointer Dereference. CVSS score: 5.5/10. Published 2017-10-02.

How severe is CVE-2017-14974?

Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.5 out of 10.

Is CVE-2017-14974 known to be exploited?

2 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

NULL pointer dereference in GNU Binutils

CVE-2017-14974

The *_get_synthetic_symtab functions in the Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (aka libbfd), as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.29, mishandle the failure of a certain canonicalization step, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and application crash) via a crafted ELF file, related to elf32-i386.c and elf64-x86-64.c.

Published 2017-10-02 · last modified 2026-06-17.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 5.5 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.010 (60.8th percentile), scored 2026-09-29.

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 61st percentile — 60.8% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.010 · newest: 0.010 · change: 0.000

Affected products

GNU Binutils — versions 2.29

Weakness classification (CWE)

CWE-476 — NULL Pointer Dereference

Public proof-of-concept exploits

References

sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi (Patch, Third Party Advisory, Issue Tracking)
sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2017-14974?: CVE-2017-14974 is a medium-severity vulnerability in GNU Binutils, classified under NULL Pointer Dereference. CVSS score: 5.5/10. Published 2017-10-02.
How severe is CVE-2017-14974?: Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.5 out of 10.
Is CVE-2017-14974 known to be exploited?: 2 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.