The binutils packages provide a set of binary utilities. Multiple buffer overflow flaws were found in the libbdf library used by various binutils utilities. If a user were tricked into processing a specially crafted file with an application using the libbdf library, it could cause the application to crash or, potentially, execute arbitrary code. An integer overflow flaw was found in the libbdf library used by various binutils utilities. If a user were tricked into processing a specially crafted file with an application using the libbdf library, it could cause the application to crash. A directory traversal flaw was found in the strip and objcopy utilities. A specially crafted file could cause strip or objdump to overwrite an arbitrary file writable by the user running either of these utilities. This update fixes the following bugs: * Binary files started by the system loader could lack the Relocation Read-Only protection even though it was explicitly requested when the application was built. This bug has been fixed on multiple architectures. Applications and all dependent object files, archives, and libraries built with an alpha or beta version of binutils should be rebuilt to correct this defect. * The ld linker on 64-bit PowerPC now correctly checks the output format when asked to produce a binary in another format than PowerPC. * An important variable that holds the symbol table for the binary being debugged has been made persistent, and the objdump utility on 64-bit PowerPC is now able to access the needed information without reading an invalid memory region. * Undesirable runtime relocations described in RHBA-2015:0974. The update adds these enhancements: * New hardware instructions of the IBM z Systems z13 are now supported by assembler, disassembler, and linker, as well as Single Instruction, Multiple Data instructions. * Expressions of the form: "FUNC localentry" to refer to the local entry point for the FUNC function are now supported by the PowerPC assembler. These are required by the ELFv2 ABI on the little-endian variant of IBM Power Systems. All binutils users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues and add these enhancements.