Security Advisories (1)
CVE-2026-15534 (2026-08-09)

Perl versions through 5.45.1 have out-of-bounds heap reads and writes during regular expression matching via an undersized superlinear cache in S_regmatch. The regex engine's superlinear cache holds one bit per subject position for each participating WHILEM node, so the bit count is the subject length plus one times the number of nodes. Nothing checks that product for positive overflow of the signed 32-bit count: a 286331153 byte subject matched against a pattern with 15 participating nodes stores the count as 14, leaving a two byte cache. The cache is then indexed from the real match position and node number, so reads go past the end of the allocation, and on failure CACHEsayNO sets a bit past it. A caller that matches an attacker controlled subject of this size against a pattern of this shape can crash the process or corrupt heap memory.

NAME

PerlIO::scalar - in-memory IO, scalar IO

SYNOPSIS

my $scalar = '';
...
open my $fh, "<",  \$scalar or die;
open my $fh, ">",  \$scalar or die;
open my $fh, ">>", \$scalar or die;

or

my $scalar = '';
...
open my $fh, "<:scalar",  \$scalar or die;
open my $fh, ">:scalar",  \$scalar or die;
open my $fh, ">>:scalar", \$scalar or die;

DESCRIPTION

A filehandle is opened but the file operations are performed "in-memory" on a scalar variable. All the normal file operations can be performed on the handle. The scalar is considered a stream of bytes. Currently fileno($fh) returns -1.

Attempting to open a read-only scalar for writing will fail, and if warnings are enabled, produce a warning.

IMPLEMENTATION NOTE

PerlIO::scalar only exists as a stub. One does not need to explicitly use PerlIO::scalar.