Reference page — cumulative record through Monday, October 19, 2026 UTC. Reference pages update as the archive grows; only dated daily editions are immutable pages of record.

CVE-2019-12972

CVE-2019-12972MEDIUM

n/a n/a — An issue was discovered in the Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (aka libbfd), as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.32.

  AV  AC  PR  UI  S  C  I  A   CVSS    EPSS   %ile   KEV
   L   L   N   R  U  N  N  H    5.5   .0180   78.2     —

AFFECTED
  Product  Versions  Fixed
  n/a      n/a –     —

TIMELINE
  Jun 26  Reserved by mitre
  Jun 26  Published (CNA: mitre)
  Oct 8   ENRICHED — CVE-2019-12972. Received CVSS 5.5 and CPE data from NVD.
  Oct 8   EXPLOIT PUBLISHED — CVE-2019-12972. Public exploit reference added.

CWE-125 · CNA: mitre · CVSS v3.1 · 7 references · NVD status: Modified

Description

An issue was discovered in the Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (aka libbfd), as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.32. There is a heap-based buffer over-read in _bfd_doprnt in bfd.c because elf_object_p in elfcode.h mishandles an e_shstrndx section of type SHT_GROUP by omitting a trailing '\0' character.

Lifecycle

Complete event history — 4 events, chronological
Date	Event	Detail
June 26, 2019	Reserved	Reserved by mitre
June 26, 2019	Published	Published (CNA: mitre)
October 8, 2026	ENRICHED	ENRICHED — CVE-2019-12972. Received CVSS 5.5 and CPE data from NVD.
October 8, 2026	EXPLOIT PUBLISHED	EXPLOIT PUBLISHED — CVE-2019-12972. Public exploit reference added.

Affected

Affected products and packages — 1 row
Vendor	Product / Package	Ecosystem	Version introduced	Fixed
n/a	n/a	—	n/a	—

Weaknesses

CWE-125

References (7)

http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-10/msg00078.html [Mailing List, Third Party Advisory]
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-11/msg00004.html [Mailing List, Third Party Advisory]
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/108903 [Broken Link, Third Party Advisory, VDB Entry]
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202007-39 [Third Party Advisory]
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=24689 [Exploit, Issue Tracking, Patch, Third Party Advisory]
https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git%3Bh=890f750a3b053532a4b839a2dd6243076de12031
https://usn.ubuntu.com/4336-1/ [Third Party Advisory]

Authoritative record: CVE-2019-12972 at cve.org

Weaknesses: CWE-125

About this page

This is a reference page, not a dated page of record. It assembles the complete lifecycle of CVE-2019-12972 from the CVE Program record, NVD enrichment, the CISA KEV catalog, EPSS, and OSV advisories. The box score's numbers (CVSS, EPSS, KEV status) are current as of Monday, October 19, 2026 UTC and are re-derived as the archive grows; only dated daily editions are immutable pages of record. The authoritative source for this identifier is cve.org.