CVE-2023-47038
HighSummary
A vulnerability in Perl 5.30.0 through 5.38.0 allows a heap buffer overflow when compiling a crafted regular expression. An attacker can exploit this to cause a controlled buffer overflow.
Risk Assessment
The risk includes potential arbitrary code execution or application crashes when Perl processes untrusted regular expressions. This could lead to system integrity compromise.
Recommendation
Immediately update Perl to version 5.38.1 or later, which includes the fix. Also restrict processing of untrusted regular expressions.
Other vulnerabilities in Perl
See all- CVE-2016-1238High
Perl versions 5.x before 5.22.3-RC2 and 5.24 before 5.24.1-RC2 improperly remove '.' characters from the end of the includes directory array. This may allow local users to gain privileges via a Trojan horse module under the current working directory.
- CVE-2016-2381High
Perl may allow context-dependent attackers to bypass the taint protection mechanism in a child process via duplicate environment variables in envp.
- CVE-2024-56406High
A heap buffer overflow vulnerability was discovered in Perl. Affected versions include release branches 5.34, 5.36, 5.38, and 5.40, as well as development versions from 5.33.1 through 5.41.10. When non-ASCII bytes are present in the left-hand side of the `tr` operator, `S_do_trans_invmap` can overflow the buffer.
- CVE-2026-13221Critical
Perl versions before 5.40.5-RC1, from 5.41.0 before 5.42.3-RC1, from 5.43.0 before 5.43.10 produce silently incorrect regular expression matches when an alternation of more than 65535 fixed string branches is compiled into a trie in Perl_study_chunk. Overflow of a 16-bit field truncates the match decision table, leading to false positive and false negative matches.
- CVE-2026-8376Critical
Perl versions before 5.40.5-RC1, from 5.41.0 before 5.42.3-RC1, from 5.43.0 before 5.43.11 have a heap buffer overflow when compiling regular expressions with a repeated fixed string on 32-bit builds. The bug in Perl_study_chunk in regcomp_study.c checked buffer size in characters rather than bytes, leading to undersized allocation and out-of-bounds write.
- CVE-2022-48522Critical
In Perl 5.34.0, function S_find_uninit_var in sv.c has a stack-based crash that can lead to remote code execution or local privilege escalation.
- CVE-2020-12723High
In Perl before 5.30.3, regcomp.c allows a buffer overflow via a crafted regular expression because of recursive S_study_chunk calls.
- CVE-2020-10878High
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-2020-10543High
In Perl before 5.30.3 on 32-bit platforms, a heap-based buffer overflow occurs because nested regular expression quantifiers have an integer overflow.
- CVE-2015-8608Critical
The VDir::MapPathA and VDir::MapPathW functions in Perl 5.22 allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service (out-of-bounds read) and possibly execute arbitrary code via a crafted (1) drive letter or (2) pInName argument.
Original NVD description (English source)
A vulnerability was found in perl 5.30.0 through 5.38.0. This issue occurs when a crafted regular expression is compiled by perl, which can allow an attacker controlled byte buffer overflow in a heap allocated buffer.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS

