[kayamon]

readelf specifically doesn't use BFD - one of it's majors reasons for existence is to validate libbfd.

[fabulist]

Hmm, my mistake. You're completely correct.

From the readelf man page:

      This program performs a similar function to objdump but it goes into
      more detail and it exists independently of the BFD library,
      so if there is a bug in BFD then readelf will not be affected.