Security
Security
A buffer overflow in the Regular Expression engine in Perl possibly allows for the execution of arbitrary code.
| Package | dev-lang/perl on all architectures |
|---|---|
| Affected versions | < 5.8.8-r4 |
| Unaffected versions | >= 5.8.8-r4 |
Perl is a stable, cross-platform programming language created by Larry Wall.
Tavis Ormandy and Will Drewry (Google Security Team) discovered a heap-based buffer overflow in the Regular Expression engine (regcomp.c) that occurs when switching from byte to Unicode (UTF-8) characters in a regular expression.
A remote attacker could either entice a user to compile a specially crafted regular expression or actively compile it in case the script accepts remote input of regular expressions, possibly leading to the execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running Perl.
There is no known workaround at this time.
All Perl users should upgrade to the latest version:
# emerge --sync # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=dev-lang/perl-5.8.8-r4"
Release date
November 19, 2007
Latest revision
November 19, 2007: 01
Severity
normal
Exploitable
remote
Bugzilla entries