CVE-2016-4487 Gnu CVE debrief

Who should care

Administrators, maintainers, and downstream distributors that ship or embed GNU libiberty, especially in workflows that analyze or process untrusted binaries. Toolchain teams and security responders should also pay attention because crashes may affect build, analysis, or inspection pipelines.

Technical summary

The vulnerability is a use-after-free (CWE-416) in libiberty, referenced by NVD and linked to GCC Bugzilla issue 70481. The published description says a remote attacker can cause a denial of service by supplying a crafted binary, with the failure mode being a segmentation fault and crash. The NVD CVSS vector provided for the record is CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H, which suggests local execution with user interaction is required in the scored scenario. That creates a noteworthy description-versus-vector mismatch in the source data, so defenders should rely on the exact product context and deployment path when assessing exposure.

Defensive priority

Medium priority: address promptly in environments that process untrusted or externally supplied binaries, but this is not an indication of code execution or data theft based on the supplied record.

Recommended defensive actions

• Identify whether your software stack includes GNU libiberty directly or via a bundled toolchain package.
• Apply the vendor or distribution update that resolves the use-after-free, or backport the fix if you maintain an older release.
• Treat untrusted binary analysis workflows as higher risk and isolate them where possible.
• Monitor for crashes or segmentation faults in affected tooling, especially when handling crafted or malformed binaries.
• Review the linked NVD and GCC Bugzilla references to confirm whether your deployment matches the affected code path.

Evidence notes

The supplied NVD record describes a use-after-free in libiberty related to "btypevec," with impact limited to denial of service via segmentation fault/crash. The record's weakness classification is CWE-416, and the CVSS vector supplied by NVD is AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H. The timeline in the corpus shows public reference material on 2016-05-05 via oss-security, while the CVE record was published by NVD on 2017-02-24 and later modified on 2026-05-13; those dates are record/timeline context, not the vulnerability's original creation date.

Official resources