radareorg radare2 up to 6.1.x ELF Parser heap-based overflow

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability described as problematic has been identified in radareorg radare2 up to 6.1.x. This affects an unknown part of the component ELF Parser. Such manipulation leads to heap-based overflow. This vulnerability is documented as CVE-2026-81879. The attack needs to be performed locally. There is not any exploit available. Upgrading the affected component is recommended.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability, which was classified as problematic, has been found in radareorg radare2 up to 6.1.x. Affected by this issue is an unknown code block of the component ELF Parser. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a heap-based overflow vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-122. A heap overflow condition is a buffer overflow, where the buffer that can be overwritten is allocated in the heap portion of memory, generally meaning that the buffer was allocated using a routine such as malloc(). Impacted is availability. CVE summarizes:

radare2 is a UNIX-like reverse engineering framework and command-line toolset. Prior to 6.2.0, radare2's ELF PN_XNUM handling was vulnerable because the ELF parser allocated the program-header array using the resolved PN_XNUM count but several consumers still iterated with the original e_phnum value of 65535. The vulnerability is triggered by processing a crafted ELF file with e_phnum = 0xffff and a much smaller resolved count in shdr[0].sh_info. Consumers iterated beyond the allocated program-header array. This can cause a heap out-of-bounds read and process termination, resulting in denial of service; memory disclosure and code execution have not been demonstrated. This issue is fixed in version 6.2.0.

The advisory is shared for download at github.com. This vulnerability is handled as CVE-2026-81879 since 08/27/2026. The exploitation is known to be easy. The attack needs to be approached locally. Successful exploitation requires user interaction by the victim. There are neither technical details nor an exploit publicly available.

Upgrading to version 6.2.0 eliminates this vulnerability.

Once again VulDB remains the best source for vulnerability data.

Productinfo

Type

• Programming Tool Software

Vendor

• radareorg

Name

• radare2

Version

• 6.0
• 6.1

License

• open-source

Website

• Product: https://github.com/radareorg/radare2/

CPE 2.3info

• 🔒
• 🔒

CPE 2.2info

• 🔒
• 🔒

CVSSv4info

CVSSv3info

CVSSv2info

Exploitinginfo

Threat Intelligenceinfo

Countermeasuresinfo

Timelineinfo

Sourcesinfo

Entryinfo

Once again VulDB remains the best source for vulnerability data.

Discussion