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perl-5.28.2
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Security Advisories (7)
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-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

NAME

perldelta - what is new for perl v5.28.2

DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.28.1 release and the 5.28.2 release.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.28.0, first read perl5281delta, which describes differences between 5.28.0 and 5.28.1.

Incompatible Changes

There are several sets of digits in the Common script. [0-9] is the most familiar. But there are also [\x{FF10}-\x{FF19}] (FULLWIDTH DIGIT ZERO - FULLWIDTH DIGIT NINE), and several sets for use in mathematical notation, such as the MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK DIGITs. Any of these sets should be able to appear in script runs of, say, Greek. But the previous design overlooked all but the ASCII digits [0-9], so the design was flawed. This has been fixed, so is both a bug fix and an incompatibility.

All digits in a run still have to come from the same set of ten digits.

[perl #133547]

Modules and Pragmata

Updated Modules and Pragmata

  • Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20181129_28 to 5.20190419.

  • PerlIO::scalar has been upgraded from version 0.29 to 0.30.

  • Storable has been upgraded from version 3.08 to 3.08_01.

Platform Support

Platform-Specific Notes

Windows

The Windows Server 2003 SP1 Platform SDK build, with its early x64 compiler and tools, was accidentally broken in Perl 5.27.9. This has now been fixed.

Mac OS X

Perl's build and testing process on Mac OS X for -Duseshrplib builds is now compatible with Mac OS X System Integrity Protection (SIP).

SIP prevents binaries in /bin (and a few other places) being passed the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. For our purposes this prevents DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH from being passed to the shell, which prevents that variable being passed to the testing or build process, so running perl couldn't find libperl.dylib.

To work around that, the initial build of the perl executable expects to find libperl.dylib in the build directory, and the library path is then adjusted during installation to point to the installed library.

[perl #126706]

Selected Bug Fixes

  • If an in-place edit is still in progress during global destruction and the process exit code (as stored in $?) is zero, perl will now treat the in-place edit as successful, replacing the input file with any output produced.

    This allows code like:

    perl -i -ne 'print "Foo"; last'

    to replace the input file, while code like:

    perl -i -ne 'print "Foo"; die'

    will not. Partly resolves [perl #133659].

    [perl #133659]

  • A regression in Perl 5.28 caused the following code to fail

    close(STDIN); open(CHILD, "|wc -l")'

    because the child's stdin would be closed on exec. This has now been fixed.

  • pack "u", "invalid uuencoding" now properly NUL terminates the zero-length SV produced.

    [perl #132655]

  • Failing to compile a format now aborts compilation. Like other errors in sub-parses this could leave the parser in a strange state, possibly crashing perl if compilation continued.

    [perl #132158]

  • See "Any set of digits in the Common script are legal in a script run of another script".

Acknowledgements

Perl 5.28.2 represents approximately 4 months of development since Perl 5.28.1 and contains approximately 2,500 lines of changes across 75 files from 13 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 1,200 lines of changes to 29 .pm, .t, .c and .h files.

Perl continues to flourish into its fourth decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.28.2:

Aaron Crane, Abigail, Andy Dougherty, David Mitchell, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, Leon Timmermans, Nicolas R., Sawyer X, Steve Hay, Tina Müller, Tony Cook, Zak B. Elep.

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 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 see "SECURITY VULNERABILITY CONTACT INFORMATION" in perlsec for details of how to report the issue.

Give Thanks

If you wish to thank the Perl 5 Porters for the work we had done in Perl 5, you can do so by running the perlthanks program:

perlthanks

This will send an email to the Perl 5 Porters list with your show of thanks.

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.