Security Advisories (21)
CVE-2011-2728 (2012-12-21)

The bsd_glob function in the File::Glob module for Perl before 5.14.2 allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via a glob expression with the GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC flag, which triggers an uninitialized pointer dereference.

CVE-2020-12723 (2020-06-05)

regcomp.c in Perl before 5.30.3 allows a buffer overflow via a crafted regular expression because of recursive S_study_chunk calls.

CVE-2020-10878 (2020-06-05)

Perl before 5.30.3 has an integer overflow related to mishandling of a "PL_regkind[OP(n)] == NOTHING" situation. A crafted regular expression could lead to malformed bytecode with a possibility of instruction injection.

CVE-2020-10543 (2020-06-05)

Perl before 5.30.3 on 32-bit platforms allows a heap-based buffer overflow because nested regular expression quantifiers have an integer overflow.

CVE-2018-6913 (2018-04-17)

Heap-based buffer overflow in the pack function in Perl before 5.26.2 allows context-dependent attackers to execute arbitrary code via a large item count.

CVE-2018-18314 (2018-12-07)

Perl before 5.26.3 has a buffer overflow via a crafted regular expression that triggers invalid write operations.

CVE-2018-18313 (2018-12-07)

Perl before 5.26.3 has a buffer over-read via a crafted regular expression that triggers disclosure of sensitive information from process memory.

CVE-2018-18312 (2018-12-05)

Perl before 5.26.3 and 5.28.0 before 5.28.1 has a buffer overflow via a crafted regular expression that triggers invalid write operations.

CVE-2018-18311 (2018-12-07)

Perl before 5.26.3 and 5.28.x before 5.28.1 has a buffer overflow via a crafted regular expression that triggers invalid write operations.

CVE-2015-8853 (2016-05-25)

The (1) S_reghop3, (2) S_reghop4, and (3) S_reghopmaybe3 functions in regexec.c in Perl before 5.24.0 allow context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite loop) via crafted utf-8 data, as demonstrated by "a\x80."

CVE-2013-1667 (2013-03-14)

The rehash mechanism in Perl 5.8.2 through 5.16.x allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption and crash) via a crafted hash key.

CVE-2010-4777 (2014-02-10)

The Perl_reg_numbered_buff_fetch function in Perl 5.10.0, 5.12.0, 5.14.0, and other versions, when running with debugging enabled, allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (assertion failure and application exit) via crafted input that is not properly handled when using certain regular expressions, as demonstrated by causing SpamAssassin and OCSInventory to crash.

CVE-2012-5195 (2012-12-18)

Heap-based buffer overflow in the Perl_repeatcpy function in util.c in Perl 5.12.x before 5.12.5, 5.14.x before 5.14.3, and 5.15.x before 15.15.5 allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption and crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via the 'x' string repeat operator.

CVE-2016-2381 (2016-04-08)

Perl might allow context-dependent attackers to bypass the taint protection mechanism in a child process via duplicate environment variables in envp.

CVE-2013-7422 (2015-08-16)

Integer underflow in regcomp.c in Perl before 5.20, as used in Apple OS X before 10.10.5 and other products, allows context-dependent attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (application crash) via a long digit string associated with an invalid backreference within a regular expression.

CVE-2011-1487 (2011-04-11)

The (1) lc, (2) lcfirst, (3) uc, and (4) ucfirst functions in Perl 5.10.x, 5.11.x, and 5.12.x through 5.12.3, and 5.13.x through 5.13.11, do not apply the taint attribute to the return value upon processing tainted input, which might allow context-dependent attackers to bypass the taint protection mechanism via a crafted string.

CVE-2023-47100

In Perl before 5.38.2, S_parse_uniprop_string in regcomp.c can write to unallocated space because a property name associated with a \p{...} regular expression construct is mishandled. The earliest affected version is 5.30.0.

CVE-2024-56406 (2025-04-13)

A heap buffer overflow vulnerability was discovered in Perl. 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-2023-47039 (2023-10-30)

Perl for Windows relies on the system path environment variable to find the shell (cmd.exe). When running an executable which uses Windows Perl interpreter, Perl attempts to find and execute cmd.exe within the operating system. However, due to path search order issues, Perl initially looks for cmd.exe in the current working directory. An attacker with limited privileges can exploit this behavior by placing cmd.exe in locations with weak permissions, such as C:\ProgramData. By doing so, when an administrator attempts to use this executable from these compromised locations, arbitrary code can be executed.

CVE-2016-1238 (2016-08-02)

(1) cpan/Archive-Tar/bin/ptar, (2) cpan/Archive-Tar/bin/ptardiff, (3) cpan/Archive-Tar/bin/ptargrep, (4) cpan/CPAN/scripts/cpan, (5) cpan/Digest-SHA/shasum, (6) cpan/Encode/bin/enc2xs, (7) cpan/Encode/bin/encguess, (8) cpan/Encode/bin/piconv, (9) cpan/Encode/bin/ucmlint, (10) cpan/Encode/bin/unidump, (11) cpan/ExtUtils-MakeMaker/bin/instmodsh, (12) cpan/IO-Compress/bin/zipdetails, (13) cpan/JSON-PP/bin/json_pp, (14) cpan/Test-Harness/bin/prove, (15) dist/ExtUtils-ParseXS/lib/ExtUtils/xsubpp, (16) dist/Module-CoreList/corelist, (17) ext/Pod-Html/bin/pod2html, (18) utils/c2ph.PL, (19) utils/h2ph.PL, (20) utils/h2xs.PL, (21) utils/libnetcfg.PL, (22) utils/perlbug.PL, (23) utils/perldoc.PL, (24) utils/perlivp.PL, and (25) utils/splain.PL in Perl 5.x before 5.22.3-RC2 and 5.24 before 5.24.1-RC2 do not properly remove . (period) characters from the end of the includes directory array, which might allow local users to gain privileges via a Trojan horse module under the current working directory.

CVE-2015-8608 (2017-02-07)

The VDir::MapPathA and VDir::MapPathW functions in Perl 5.22 allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service (out-of-bounds read) and possibly execute arbitrary code via a crafted (1) drive letter or (2) pInName argument.

NAME

perldbmfilter - Perl DBM Filters

SYNOPSIS

$db = tie %hash, 'DBM', ...

$old_filter = $db->filter_store_key  ( sub { ... } );
$old_filter = $db->filter_store_value( sub { ... } );
$old_filter = $db->filter_fetch_key  ( sub { ... } );
$old_filter = $db->filter_fetch_value( sub { ... } );

DESCRIPTION

The four filter_* methods shown above are available in all the DBM modules that ship with Perl, namely DB_File, GDBM_File, NDBM_File, ODBM_File and SDBM_File.

Each of the methods work identically, and are used to install (or uninstall) a single DBM Filter. The only difference between them is the place that the filter is installed.

To summarise:

filter_store_key

If a filter has been installed with this method, it will be invoked every time you write a key to a DBM database.

filter_store_value

If a filter has been installed with this method, it will be invoked every time you write a value to a DBM database.

filter_fetch_key

If a filter has been installed with this method, it will be invoked every time you read a key from a DBM database.

filter_fetch_value

If a filter has been installed with this method, it will be invoked every time you read a value from a DBM database.

You can use any combination of the methods from none to all four.

All filter methods return the existing filter, if present, or undef in not.

To delete a filter pass undef to it.

The Filter

When each filter is called by Perl, a local copy of $_ will contain the key or value to be filtered. Filtering is achieved by modifying the contents of $_. The return code from the filter is ignored.

An Example: the NULL termination problem.

DBM Filters are useful for a class of problems where you always want to make the same transformation to all keys, all values or both.

For example, consider the following scenario. You have a DBM database that you need to share with a third-party C application. The C application assumes that all keys and values are NULL terminated. Unfortunately when Perl writes to DBM databases it doesn't use NULL termination, so your Perl application will have to manage NULL termination itself. When you write to the database you will have to use something like this:

$hash{"$key\0"} = "$value\0";

Similarly the NULL needs to be taken into account when you are considering the length of existing keys/values.

It would be much better if you could ignore the NULL terminations issue in the main application code and have a mechanism that automatically added the terminating NULL to all keys and values whenever you write to the database and have them removed when you read from the database. As I'm sure you have already guessed, this is a problem that DBM Filters can fix very easily.

use strict;
use warnings;
use SDBM_File;
use Fcntl;

my %hash;
my $filename = "filt";
unlink $filename;

my $db = tie(%hash, 'SDBM_File', $filename, O_RDWR|O_CREAT, 0640)
  or die "Cannot open $filename: $!\n";

# Install DBM Filters
$db->filter_fetch_key  ( sub { s/\0$//    } );
$db->filter_store_key  ( sub { $_ .= "\0" } );
$db->filter_fetch_value( 
    sub { no warnings 'uninitialized'; s/\0$// } );
$db->filter_store_value( sub { $_ .= "\0" } );

$hash{"abc"} = "def";
my $a = $hash{"ABC"};
# ...
undef $db;
untie %hash;

The code above uses SDBM_File, but it will work with any of the DBM modules.

Hopefully the contents of each of the filters should be self-explanatory. Both "fetch" filters remove the terminating NULL, and both "store" filters add a terminating NULL.

Another Example: Key is a C int.

Here is another real-life example. By default, whenever Perl writes to a DBM database it always writes the key and value as strings. So when you use this:

$hash{12345} = "something";

the key 12345 will get stored in the DBM database as the 5 byte string "12345". If you actually want the key to be stored in the DBM database as a C int, you will have to use pack when writing, and unpack when reading.

Here is a DBM Filter that does it:

use strict;
use warnings;
use DB_File;
my %hash;
my $filename = "filt";
unlink $filename;


my $db = tie %hash, 'DB_File', $filename, O_CREAT|O_RDWR, 0666, $DB_HASH 
  or die "Cannot open $filename: $!\n";

$db->filter_fetch_key  ( sub { $_ = unpack("i", $_) } );
$db->filter_store_key  ( sub { $_ = pack ("i", $_) } );
$hash{123} = "def";
# ...
undef $db;
untie %hash;

The code above uses DB_File, but again it will work with any of the DBM modules.

This time only two filters have been used; we only need to manipulate the contents of the key, so it wasn't necessary to install any value filters.

SEE ALSO

DB_File, GDBM_File, NDBM_File, ODBM_File and SDBM_File.

AUTHOR

Paul Marquess