Security Advisories (7)
CVE-2024-56406 (2025-04-13)

A heap buffer overflow vulnerability was discovered in Perl. Release branches 5.34, 5.36, 5.38 and 5.40 are affected, including development versions from 5.33.1 through 5.41.10. When there are non-ASCII bytes in the left-hand-side of the `tr` operator, `S_do_trans_invmap` can overflow the destination pointer `d`.    $ perl -e '$_ = "\x{FF}" x 1000000; tr/\xFF/\x{100}/;'    Segmentation fault (core dumped) It is believed that this vulnerability can enable Denial of Service and possibly Code Execution attacks on platforms that lack sufficient defenses.

CVE-2026-4176 (2026-03-29)

Perl versions from 5.9.4 before 5.40.4-RC1, from 5.41.0 before 5.42.2-RC1, from 5.43.0 before 5.43.9 contain a vulnerable version of Compress::Raw::Zlib. Compress::Raw::Zlib is included in the Perl package as a dual-life core module, and is vulnerable to CVE-2026-3381 due to a vendored version of zlib which has several vulnerabilities, including CVE-2026-27171. The bundled Compress::Raw::Zlib was updated to version 2.221 in Perl blead commit c75ae9cc164205e1b6d6dbd57bd2c65c8593fe94.

CVE-2025-40909 (2025-05-30)

Perl threads have a working directory race condition where file operations may target unintended paths. If a directory handle is open at thread creation, the process-wide current working directory is temporarily changed in order to clone that handle for the new thread, which is visible from any third (or more) thread already running. This may lead to unintended operations such as loading code or accessing files from unexpected locations, which a local attacker may be able to exploit. The bug was introduced in commit 11a11ecf4bea72b17d250cfb43c897be1341861e and released in Perl version 5.13.6

CVE-2026-13221 (2026-07-13)

Perl versions through 5.43.9 produce silently incorrect regular expression matches when an alternation of more than 65535 fixed string branches is compiled into a trie in Perl_study_chunk. When such branches are combined into a trie, the delta between the first branch and the shared tail is stored in a 16-bit field. A branch count above 65535 overflows the field, and the trie's match decision table is truncated with no warning or error. A pattern of this shape produces false positive matches (matching strings it should not) and false negative matches (failing to match strings it should). When such a pattern gates an access or filtering decision, the result is wrong.

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.

CVE-2026-57432 (2026-07-13)

Perl versions through 5.43.10 have an integer overflow in S_measure_struct leading to an out-of-bounds heap read in pack and unpack. S_measure_struct adds each item's size times its repeat count to a running total with no overflow check, so a large repeat count in a pack or unpack template wraps the signed SSize_t total negative. The @, X, and x position codes then guard their moves with a signed length comparison that passes when the length is negative, advancing the buffer pointer out of bounds. A template derived from untrusted input can read heap memory past the buffer and return it to the caller.

CVE-2026-8376 (2026-05-25)

Perl versions through 5.43.10 have a heap buffer overflow when compiling regular expressions with a repeated fixed string on 32-bit builds. Perl_study_chunk in regcomp_study.c checked the size of the joined substring buffer in characters rather than bytes. For a quantified fixed substring with a large minimum count, the byte length mincount * l could overflow SSize_t, producing an undersized SvGROW allocation; the subsequent copy writes past the end of the buffer. A caller that compiles an attacker-controlled regular expression on a 32-bit perl build triggers a heap buffer overflow at compile time.

NAME

App::Prove - Implements the prove command.

VERSION

Version 3.50

DESCRIPTION

Test::Harness provides a command, prove, which runs a TAP based test suite and prints a report. The prove command is a minimal wrapper around an instance of this module.

SYNOPSIS

use App::Prove;

my $app = App::Prove->new;
$app->process_args(@ARGV);
$app->run;

METHODS

Class Methods

new

Create a new App::Prove. Optionally a hash ref of attribute initializers may be passed.

state_class

Getter/setter for the name of the class used for maintaining state. This class should either subclass from App::Prove::State or provide an identical interface.

state_manager

Getter/setter for the instance of the state_class.

add_rc_file

$prove->add_rc_file('myproj/.proverc');

Called before process_args to prepend the contents of an rc file to the options.

process_args

$prove->process_args(@args);

Processes the command-line arguments. Attributes will be set appropriately. Any filenames may be found in the argv attribute.

Dies on invalid arguments.

run

Perform whatever actions the command line args specified. The prove command line tool consists of the following code:

use App::Prove;

my $app = App::Prove->new;
$app->process_args(@ARGV);
exit( $app->run ? 0 : 1 );  # if you need the exit code

require_harness

Load a harness replacement class.

$prove->require_harness($for => $class_name);

Display the version numbers of the loaded TAP::Harness and the current Perl.

Attributes

After command line parsing the following attributes reflect the values of the corresponding command line switches. They may be altered before calling run.

archive
argv
backwards
blib
color
directives
dry
exec
extensions
failures
comments
formatter
harness
ignore_exit
includes
jobs
lib
merge
modules
parse
plugins
quiet
really_quiet
recurse
rules
show_count
show_help
show_man
show_version
shuffle
state
state_class
taint_fail
taint_warn
test_args
timer
verbose
warnings_fail
warnings_warn
tapversion
trap

PLUGINS

App::Prove provides support for 3rd-party plugins. These are currently loaded at run-time, after arguments have been parsed (so you can not change the way arguments are processed, sorry), typically with the -Pplugin switch, eg:

prove -PMyPlugin

This will search for a module named App::Prove::Plugin::MyPlugin, or failing that, MyPlugin. If the plugin can't be found, prove will complain & exit.

You can pass an argument to your plugin by appending an = after the plugin name, eg -PMyPlugin=foo. You can pass multiple arguments using commas:

prove -PMyPlugin=foo,bar,baz

These are passed in to your plugin's load() class method (if it has one), along with a reference to the App::Prove object that is invoking your plugin:

sub load {
    my ($class, $p) = @_;

    my @args = @{ $p->{args} };
    # @args will contain ( 'foo', 'bar', 'baz' )
    $p->{app_prove}->do_something;
    ...
}

Sample Plugin

Here's a sample plugin, for your reference:

package App::Prove::Plugin::Foo;

# Sample plugin, try running with:
# prove -PFoo=bar -r -j3
# prove -PFoo -Q
# prove -PFoo=bar,My::Formatter

use strict;
use warnings;

sub load {
    my ($class, $p) = @_;
    my @args = @{ $p->{args} };
    my $app  = $p->{app_prove};

    print "loading plugin: $class, args: ", join(', ', @args ), "\n";

    # turn on verbosity
    $app->verbose( 1 );

    # set the formatter?
    $app->formatter( $args[1] ) if @args > 1;

    # print some of App::Prove's state:
    for my $attr (qw( jobs quiet really_quiet recurse verbose )) {
        my $val = $app->$attr;
        $val    = 'undef' unless defined( $val );
        print "$attr: $val\n";
    }

    return 1;
}

1;

SEE ALSO

prove, TAP::Harness