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perl-5.23.0
River stage five • 12010 direct dependents • 33600 total dependents
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Security Advisories (19)
CVE-2016-6185 (2016-08-02)

The XSLoader::load method in XSLoader in Perl does not properly locate .so files when called in a string eval, which might allow local users to execute arbitrary code via a Trojan horse library under the current working directory.

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-2018-6798 (2018-04-17)

An issue was discovered in Perl 5.22 through 5.26. Matching a crafted locale dependent regular expression can cause a heap-based buffer over-read and potentially information disclosure.

CVE-2018-6797 (2018-04-17)

An issue was discovered in Perl 5.18 through 5.26. A crafted regular expression can cause a heap-based buffer overflow, with control over the bytes written.

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-2017-12883 (2017-09-19)

Buffer overflow in the S_grok_bslash_N function in regcomp.c in Perl 5 before 5.24.3-RC1 and 5.26.x before 5.26.1-RC1 allows remote attackers to disclose sensitive information or cause a denial of service (application crash) via a crafted regular expression with an invalid '\\N{U+...}' escape.

CVE-2017-12837 (2017-09-19)

Heap-based buffer overflow in the S_regatom function in regcomp.c in Perl 5 before 5.24.3-RC1 and 5.26.x before 5.26.1-RC1 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (out-of-bounds write) via a regular expression with a '\\N{}' escape and the case-insensitive modifier.

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-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-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-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-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.

NAME

perldelta - what is new for perl v5.23.0

DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.22.0 release and the 5.23.0 release.

Core Enhancements

Unicode 8.0 is now supported

For details on what is in this release, see http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode8.0.0/.

Incompatible Changes

The /\C/ character class has been removed.

This regular expression character class was deprecated in v5.20.0 and has produced a deprecation warning since v5.22.0. It is now a compile-time error. If you need to examine the individual bytes that make up a UTF8-encoded character, then use utf8::encode() on the string (or a copy) first.

chdir('') no longer chdirs home

Using chdir('') or chdir(undef) to chdir home has been deprecated since perl v5.8, and will now fail. Use chdir() instead.

Modules and Pragmata

Updated Modules and Pragmata

  • The libnet distribution has been upgraded from version 3.05 to 3.06.

  • The Scalar-List-Utils distribution has been upgraded from version 1.41 to 1.42.

  • autodie has been upgraded from version 2.26 to 2.27.

  • CPAN::Meta has been upgraded from version 2.150001 to 2.150005.

  • CPAN::Meta::Requirements has been upgraded from version 2.132 to 2.133.

  • CPAN::Meta::YAML has been upgraded from version 0.012 to 0.016.

  • Encode has been upgraded from version 2.72 to 2.73.

  • encoding has been upgraded from version 2.14 to 2.15.

  • ExtUtils::CBuilder has been upgraded from version 0.280221 to 0.280223.

  • feature has been upgraded from version 1.40 to 1.41.

  • Getopt::Long has been upgraded from version 2.45 to 2.46.

  • HTTP::Tiny has been upgraded from version 0.054 to 0.056.

  • List::Util has been upgraded from version 1.41 to 1.42_01.

  • Locale::Codes has been upgraded from version 3.34 to 3.35.

  • Math::BigInt has been upgraded from version 1.9997 to 1.999701.

    Correct the behaviour of bdiv() and bmod() in list context. [perl #124300]

    Correct Math::BigInt->new() for non-integer input. [perl #124325]

    Speed up Math::BigFloat -> blog(). [perl #124382]

    Fix bug in Math::BigFloat's bceil() and bint() methods. [perl #124412]

  • Math::BigRat has been upgraded from version 0.2608 to 0.260801.

    Correct the behaviour of bdiv() and bmod() in list context. [perl #124303]

  • Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20150520 to 5.20150620.

  • Module::Metadata has been upgraded from version 1.000026 to 1.000027.

  • parent has been upgraded from version 0.232 to 0.234.

  • Parse::CPAN::Meta has been upgraded from version 1.4414 to 1.4417.

  • perl5db.pl has been upgraded from version 1.49 to 1.49_01.

    User actions are no longer evaluated after the script under the debugger finishes. [perl #71678]

  • Pod::Simple has been upgraded from version 3.29 to 3.30.

  • Pod::Usage has been upgraded from version 1.64 to 1.67.

  • POSIX has been upgraded from version 1.53 to 1.54.

    The NaN payload API has been implemented (getpayload, setpayload, setpayloadsig, issignaling).

  • Scalar::Util has been upgraded from version 1.41 to 1.42_01.

  • Socket has been upgraded from version 2.018 to 2.019.

  • threads has been upgraded from version 2.01 to 2.02.

  • Time::Piece has been upgraded from version 1.29 to 1.30.

  • UNIVERSAL has been upgraded from version 1.12 to 1.13.

    Don't import from UNIVERSAL in its documentation, it no longer exports anything. [perl #125410]

Platform Support

Platform-Specific Notes

Win32

  • Visual C++ 2013 builds will now execute on XP and higher. Previously they would only execute on Vista and higher.

  • You can now build perl with GNU Make and GCC. [perl #123440]

  • truncate($filename, $size) now works for files over 4GB in size. [perl #125347]

Selected Bug Fixes

  • Duplicating a closed file handle for write no longer creates a filename of the form GLOB(0xXXXXXXXX). [perl #125115]

  • Warning fatality is now ignored when rewinding the stack. This prevents infinite recursion when the now fatal error also causes rewinding of the stack. [perl #123398]

  • In perl v5.22.0, the logic changed when parsing a numeric parameter to the -C option, such that the successfully parsed number was not saved as the option value if it parsed to the end of the argument. [perl #125381]

  • The PadlistNAMES macro is an lvalue again.

  • Zero -DPERL_TRACE_OPS memory for sub-threads.

    perl_clone_using() was missing Zero init of PL_op_exec_cnt[]. This caused sub-threads in threaded -DPERL_TRACE_OPS builds to spew exceedingly large op-counts at destruct. These counts would print %x as "ABABABAB", clearly a mem-poison value.

Acknowledgements

Perl 5.23.0 represents approximately 3 weeks of development since Perl 5.22.0 and contains approximately 86,000 lines of changes across 480 files from 29 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 55,000 lines of changes to 270 .pm, .t, .c and .h files.

Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.23.0:

Chase Whitener, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, Daniel Dragan, David Golden, David Mitchell, Hugo van der Sanden, Jan Dubois, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Jerry D. Hedden, Jim Cromie, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, kmx, Lukas Mai, Martijn Lievaart, Matthew Horsfall, Niko Tyni, Peter John Acklam, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes, Shlomi Fish, Steve Hay, Thomas Sibley, Tony Cook, Unicode Consortium, Zefram.

The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically generated from version control history. In particular, it does not include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish.

For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors, please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.

Reporting Bugs

If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug database at https://rt.perl.org/ . There may also be information at http://www.perl.org/ , the Perl Home Page.

If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug program included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the output of perl -V, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by the Perl porting team.

If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org. This points to a closed subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core committers, who will be able to help assess the impact of issues, figure out a resolution, and help co-ordinate the release of patches to mitigate or fix the problem across all platforms on which Perl is supported. Please only use this address for security issues in the Perl core, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN.

SEE ALSO

The Changes file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details on what changed.

The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.

The README file for general stuff.

The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.