CVE-2026-15534 PUBLISHED

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

Assigner: CPANSec
Reserved: 12.07.2026 Published: 09.08.2026 Updated: 09.08.2026

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.

Product Status

Vendor LEONT
Product perl
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 0 to 5.45.1 (incl.)

Solutions

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

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-190 Integer Overflow or Wraparound CWE
  • CWE-125 Out-of-bounds Read CWE
  • CWE-787 Out-of-bounds Write CWE