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glibc + binutils: multiple unpatched CVEs not picked up in recent updates #78698

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Description

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Summary

Several HIGH/CRITICAL/MEDIUM CVEs are unpatched in Wolfi's current glibc-2.43-r7 and binutils-2.46-r1 packages even though upstream/distro patches exist. This issue expands the original scope (which was binutils-only).

glibc 2.43-r7

The May 1 update (commit 88cd4cbafix(glibc): cherry-pick patches from mailing list for CVE fixes, PR by @xnox) added two patches:

  • 0002-libio-Fix-ungetwc-operating-on-byte-stream-BZ-33998.patchCVE-2026-5928
  • 0003-stdio-common-Fix-buffer-overflow-in-scanf-mc-BZ-3400.patchCVE-2026-5450

Five other glibc CVEs in the same April 30 GLIBC-SA-2026-0009 batch that weren't cherry-picked:

CVE Severity Component
CVE-2026-4046 HIGH (7.5) iconv() IBM1390/IBM1399 assertion failure
CVE-2026-4437 HIGH (7.5) gethostbyaddr DNS backend
CVE-2026-5435 HIGH (7.3) ns_*printrrf buffer overflow
CVE-2026-4438 MEDIUM (companion fix)
CVE-2026-6238 MEDIUM ns_sprintrrf buffer overread (companion to CVE-2026-5435)

Fedora and Debian have shipped backports for all of these against the 2.43 branch; would be a one-time follow-up to the same PR.

binutils 2.46-r1

binutils.yaml was last touched 2026-03-12 with no patches (patches: section absent). Four CVEs published 2026-03-06 are unpatched:

CVE Severity Component
CVE-2025-69649 HIGH (7.5) readelf null-deref in display_relocations()
CVE-2025-69650 HIGH (7.5) readelf double-free on malformed relocation data
CVE-2025-69651 MEDIUM readelf family
CVE-2025-69652 MEDIUM readelf family

Sourceware bugzilla 33697; fix referenced at binutils-gdb commit 66a3492ce68e1ae45b2489bd9a815c39ea5d7f66. Fedora/Red Hat have backports.

Ask

Either bump the packages with the missing patches cherry-picked, or add not-affected advisory entries (with rationale) so downstream scanners stop flagging. For binutils specifically the runtime exploit surface is near-zero (readelf is a build-time analysis tool), so a not-affected entry there would be reasonable.

Impact

Container scanners (Aqua) flag 9 of 11 of these on every image built on wolfi-base. We're hitting them on nightly builds — happy to send a PR with patch backports if that helps.

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