USN-222-2: Perl vulnerability
13 December 2005
Perl vulnerability
Releases
Details
USN-222-1 fixed a vulnerability in the Perl interpreter. It was
discovered that the version of USN-222-1 was not sufficient to handle
all possible cases of malformed input that could lead to arbitrary
code execution, so another update is necessary.
Original advisory:
Jack Louis of Dyad Security discovered that Perl did not
sufficiently check the explicit length argument in format strings.
Specially crafted format strings with overly large length arguments
led to a crash of the Perl interpreter or even to execution of
arbitrary attacker-defined code with the privileges of the user
running the Perl program.
However, this attack was only possible in insecure Perl programs
which use variables with user-defined values in string
interpolations without checking their validity.
Update instructions
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
Ubuntu 5.10
-
perl-base
-
-
libperl5.8
-
Ubuntu 5.04
-
perl-base
-
-
libperl5.8
-
Ubuntu 4.10
-
perl-base
-
-
libperl5.8
-
In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.
References
Related notices
- USN-222-1: perl-base