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perl-5.45.1
⭐ Starred 2013 / pod/buildtoc
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

pod/buildtoc - Generate table of contents

DESCRIPTION

This program generates a table of contents for the documentation included in the Perl core distribution. This table of contents takes two forms:

1 pod/perltoc.pod

A file in Perl's Plain Old Documentation (POD) format found in the pod/ directory in the core distribution. Once Perl is installed, this file becomes accessible system-wide via perldoc perltoc.

2 pod/roffitall

A shell script originally written by Tom Christiansen and Raphael Manfredi, also found in the pod/ directory, which can be used to translate Perl documentation into man pages.

USAGE

This program will typically not need to be called directly by a user. Rather, it is one of the last commands invoked during make test_prep:

./perl -Ilib -I. -f pod/buildtoc -q

The only command-line switch is -q|--quiet, which quiets some non-critical warnings.

Diagnosing Problems

This program requires Porting/pod_lib.pl and makes use of several subroutines found in that file: get_pod_metadata() and pods_to_install() in particular. Consequently, any warnings or exceptions you see when this program is running may be being passed through from those subroutines. You may have to (a) examine those subroutines and/or (b) run that program from the command-line to fully understand what is causing such warnings or exceptions.

AUTHORS and MAINTENANCE

This program was introduced into the Perl 5 core distribution by Andy Dougherty, based on earlier work by Tom Christiansen. It is maintained by the Perl 5 Porters.