CVE-2020-10878
NixOS vulnerability analysis and mitigation

Overview

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 (NVD, Debian).

Technical details

The vulnerability is caused by multiple integer overflows in the calculation of offsets between instructions for the regular expression engine, which could cause corruption of the intermediate language state of a compiled regular expression. The issue has a CVSS Base Score of 8.6 HIGH with vector CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:H (NVD).

Impact

An attacker could abuse this vulnerability to insert instructions into the compiled form of a Perl regular expression. This could lead to disclosure of sensitive information, addition or modification of data, or Denial of Service (DoS) (NetApp Advisory).

Exploitability

An application written in Perl would only be vulnerable if it evaluates regular expressions supplied by the attacker. Evaluating regular expressions in this fashion is known to be dangerous since the regular expression engine does not protect against denial of service attacks in this usage scenario (Perl Delta).

Mitigation and workarounds

The vulnerability was fixed in Perl version 5.30.3. Users should upgrade to this version or later. The fix includes using long jumps if there is any possibility of overflow and extracting the rck_elide_nothing function to handle the NOTHING cases (Perl Commit, Perl Commit).

Community reactions

Multiple vendors and organizations issued advisories and patches for this vulnerability, including Oracle, Red Hat, Debian, SUSE, and NetApp. The vulnerability was discovered by Hugo van der Sanden and Slaven Rezic (NVD).

Additional resources


SourceThis report was generated using AI

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