Perl vulnerability

Releases

• Ubuntu 5.10
• Ubuntu 5.04
• Ubuntu 4.10

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.