perl5125delta (1) Linux Manual Page

NAME

perl5125delta – what is new for perl v5.12.5

DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.12.4 release and the 5.12.5 release.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.12.3, first read perl5124delta, which describes differences between 5.12.3 and 5.12.4.

Security

Encode decode_xs n-byte heap-overflow (CVE-2011-2939)

A bug in "Encode" could, on certain inputs, cause the heap to overflow. This problem has been corrected. Bug reported by Robert Zacek.

File::Glob::bsd_glob() memory error with GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC (CVE-2011-2728).

Calling "File::Glob::bsd_glob" with the unsupported flag GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC would cause an access violation / segfault. A Perl program that accepts a flags value from an external source could expose itself to denial of service or arbitrary code execution attacks. There are no known exploits in the wild. The problem has been corrected by explicitly disabling all unsupported flags and setting unused function pointers to null. Bug reported by Clément Lecigne.

Heap buffer overrun in ‘x’ string repeat operator (CVE-2012-5195)

Poorly written perl code that allows an attacker to specify the count to perl’s ‘x’ string repeat operator can already cause a memory exhaustion denial-of-service attack. A flaw in versions of perl before 5.15.5 can escalate that into a heap buffer overrun; coupled with versions of glibc before 2.16, it possibly allows the execution of arbitrary code.

This problem has been fixed.

Incompatible Changes

There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.12.4. If any exist, they are bugs and reports are welcome.

Modules and Pragmata

Updated Modules

B::Concise

B::Concise no longer produces mangled output with the -tree option [perl #80632].

charnames

A regression introduced in Perl 5.8.8 has been fixed, that caused charnames::viacode(0) to return "undef" instead of the string “NULL” [perl #72624].

Encode has been upgraded from version 2.39 to version 2.39_01.

See “Security”.

File::Glob has been upgraded from version 1.07 to version 1.07_01.

See “Security”.

Unicode::UCD

The documentation for the "upper" function now actually says “upper”, not “lower”.

Module::CoreList

Module::CoreList has been updated to version 2.50_02 to add data for this release.

Changes to Existing Documentation

perlebcdic

The perlebcdic document contains a helpful table to use in "tr///" to convert between EBCDIC and Latin1/ASCII. Unfortunately, the table was the inverse of the one it describes. This has been corrected.

perlunicode

The section on User-Defined Case Mappings had some bad markup and unclear sentences, making parts of it unreadable. This has been rectified.

perluniprops

This document has been corrected to take non-ASCII platforms into account.

Installation and Configuration Improvements

Platform Specific Changes

Mac OS X

There have been configuration and test fixes to make Perl build cleanly on Lion and Mountain Lion.

NetBSD

The NetBSD hints file was corrected to be compatible with NetBSD 6.*

Selected Bug Fixes

•

"chop" now correctly handles characters above “