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OpenAdvisories
Medium · 5.5 CVE-2026-81879 EUVD-2026-84504

radare2: Heap out-of-bounds read in radare2 ELF PN_XNUM handling

Published Sep 22, 2026 · Updated Sep 22, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

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.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
radareorg radare2 < 6.2.0 —

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 radare2 No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS radare2 No fix yet —
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS radare2 No fix yet —
Show 3 more (older releases, extended support, other products)
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu Pro 24.04 LTS radare2 No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 20.04 LTS radare2 No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 18.04 LTS radare2 No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
openSUSE Leap 16.0 radare2 6.2.2-bp160.1.1 openSUSE-SU-2026:21988-1

Advisories 1

References