Bug 2553533

Summary: CVE-2026-15534 perl: Perl: Arbitrary code execution via out-of-bounds memory access in regular expression engine. [fedora-all]
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Avinash Hanwate <ahanwate>
Component: perlAssignee: Jitka Plesnikova <jplesnik>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: rawhideCC: jplesnik, mspacek, perl-devel, ppisar, psabata, spotrh
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security, SecurityTracking
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
Whiteboard: {"flaws": ["1e2b4315-bd8b-434d-a16b-423161b1c3ac"]}
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
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Bug Depends On:    
Bug Blocks: 2512950    

Description Avinash Hanwate 2026-10-15 15:09:22 UTC
Disclaimer: Community trackers are created by Red Hat Product Security team on a best effort basis. Package maintainers are required to ascertain if the flaw indeed affects their package, before starting the update process.

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.