CVE-2024-56406: Perl 5.34, 5.36, 5.38 and 5.40 are vulnerable to a heap buffer overflow when transliterating non-ASCII bytes Stig Palmquist 13 Apr 2025 13:17 UTC

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CVE-2024-56406                                       CPAN Security Group
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         CVE ID:  CVE-2024-56406
   Distribution:  perl
       Versions:  from 5.40.0 until 5.40.2
                  from 5.38.0 until 5.38.4
                  from 5.36.0 through 5.36.3
                  from 5.34.0 through 5.34.3

       MetaCPAN:  https://metacpan.org/dist/perl
       VCS Repo:  https://github.com/Perl/perl5/

Perl 5.34, 5.36, 5.38 and 5.40 are vulnerable to a heap buffer overflow
when transliterating non-ASCII bytes

Description
-----------
A heap buffer overflow vulnerability was discovered in Perl.

When there are non-ASCII bytes in the left-hand-side of the `tr`
operator, `S_do_trans_invmap` can overflow the destination pointer `d`.

    $ perl -e '$_ = "\x{FF}" x 1000000; tr/\xFF/\x{100}/;'
    Segmentation fault (core dumped)

It is believed that this vulnerability can enable Denial of Service and
possibly Code Execution attacks on platforms that lack sufficient
defenses.

Problem types
-------------
CWE-122 Heap-based Buffer Overflow
CWE-787 Out-of-bounds Write

Mitigations
-----------
Users should update perl to 5.40.2 or 5.38.4, or apply the upstream
patch provided in the References section.

References
----------
https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commit/87f42aa0e0096e9a346c9672aa3a0bd3bef8c1dd.patch
https://metacpan.org/release/SHAY/perl-5.38.4/changes
https://metacpan.org/release/SHAY/perl-5.40.2/changes

Credits
-------
Nathan Mills, finder