CVE-2016-8679 Libdwarf Project CVE debrief

Who should care

Teams that ship, package, or use Libdwarf and any tooling that invokes dwarfdump on untrusted files should pay attention, especially Linux distro maintainers, build and analysis pipelines, and developers embedding Libdwarf.

Technical summary

NVD maps the weakness to CWE-125 and lists the vulnerable range as libdwarf_project:libdwarf versions from 1999-12-14 up to, but not including, 2016-11-24. The CVSS v3.1 vector is AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H, indicating that user interaction is required and the main impact is availability. The supplied references include an Openwall oss-security post, a Gentoo blog report, and a Red Hat bug entry, all pointing to the same Libdwarf issue and patch context.

Defensive priority

Medium. The vulnerability can cause denial of service, but it requires user interaction with a crafted file and is limited to affected Libdwarf builds.

Recommended defensive actions

• Upgrade Libdwarf to 20161124 or later, or apply the vendor package update that contains the fix.
• Identify systems and build pipelines that call dwarfdump or otherwise process untrusted DWARF files.
• Treat files from untrusted sources as potentially malicious and isolate analysis workflows where practical.
• Rebuild or redeploy downstream packages that vendor or statically link affected Libdwarf versions.
• Verify deployed versions against the NVD vulnerable version end date and document remediation in inventory records.

Evidence notes

The vulnerability description and version cutoff come from the supplied NVD record and CVE description. Official and supporting references in the corpus include the CVE record, NVD detail page, an Openwall oss-security post, a Gentoo blog write-up, and a Red Hat Bugzilla entry. The publishedAt timestamp supplied for the CVE is 2017-02-15T21:59:00.510Z; the modifiedAt timestamp is 2026-05-13T00:24:29.033Z.

Official resources