Perl: Execution of arbitrary code

Background

Perl is a stable, cross platform programming language.

Description

Tavis Ormandy and Will Drewry of the Google Security Team have reported a double free vulnerability when processing a crafted regular expression containing UTF-8 characters.

Impact

A remote attacker could possibly exploit this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code or cause a Denial of Service.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Perl users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=dev-lang/perl-5.8.8-r5"

All libperl users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=sys-devel/libperl-5.8.8-r2"