What is CVE-2020-21047?

CVE-2020-21047 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Elfutils Project, classified under Out-of-bounds Write. CVSS score: 5.5/10. Published 2023-08-22.

How severe is CVE-2020-21047?

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

Buffer overflow in Elfutils Project

CVE-2020-21047

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.

Vulnerability class: Buffer Overflow

Published 2023-08-22 · last modified 2026-06-17.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 5.5 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.002 (14.1th percentile), scored 2026-10-02.

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 14th percentile — 14.1% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.002 · newest: 0.002 · change: 0.000

Affected products

Elfutils Project — versions 0.177

Weakness classification (CWE)

CWE-787 — Out-of-bounds Write

References

sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi (Issue Tracking)
sourceware.org/git/
lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2023/09/msg00026.html (mailing-list)

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2020-21047?: CVE-2020-21047 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Elfutils Project, classified under Out-of-bounds Write. CVSS score: 5.5/10. Published 2023-08-22.
How severe is CVE-2020-21047?: Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.5 out of 10.