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.

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Advisories

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Fixes

Solution

Upgrade to a future Perl release, or apply the upstream patches.


Workaround

No workaround given by the vendor.

History

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 18:00:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description 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.
Title 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
Weaknesses CWE-125
CWE-190
CWE-787
References

Projects

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cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: CPANSec

Published:

Updated: 2026-08-09T20:08:16.567Z

Reserved: 2026-07-12T17:04:25.249Z

Link: CVE-2026-15534

cve-icon Vulnrichment

No data.

cve-icon NVD

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cve-icon Redhat

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cve-icon OpenCVE Enrichment

Updated: 2026-08-09T19:30:04Z

Weaknesses