/ 
perl-5.45.1
⭐ Starred 2013 / Porting/test-dist-modules.pl
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

test-dist-modules.pl - test modules in dist/ against the perl invoked with

SYNOPSIS

# from a checked out clean perl source tree
# test all dist/ modules, abort on first failure
path/to/perl test-dist-modules.pl

# test all dist/ modules, continue on failure
path/to/perl test-dist-modules.pl -c

# test all dist/ modules, and install into path/to/perl's site_perl
path/to/perl test-dist-modules.pl -i

DESCRIPTION

Porting/test-dist-modules.pl is used by the Github workflow to test modules from dist/ against the perl it is invoked with, within a git clone of a development perl. This clone must be a clean clone, ie. as with git clean -dxf .

That perl should have any prerequisites needed by those modules installed, at this point this includes sufficiently recent versions of:

ExtUtils::MakeMaker
Perl::OSType
Scalar::Util
Socket
version

test-dist-modules.pl will always test Devel::PPPort first and then use that when testing the other modules, even if invoked with a distribution list.

INVOKING test-dist-modules.pl

By default test-dist-modules.pl will test each directory in dist/, but you can test specific distributions by supplying them on the command-line:

path/to/perl test-dist-modules.pl threads

which will test Devel-PPPort and threads.

Options:

  • -i

  • -install

    Install the modules to the invoking perl's site_perl. This may require privileges such as running as root.

  • -c

  • -continue

    Continue testing modules even if one fails.

  • -s

  • -separate

    Install to a temp tree instead of to the invoking perl's site_perl. This is now the default.

  • -h

  • -help

    Produce a help message.