OSEC

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Re: Buffer Overflow in ActivePerl ?

From: David Cantrell (davidcantrell.org.uk)
Date: Wed May 19 2004 - 04:00:15 CDT


[CCed to activestate in case they were unaware of the discussion on
bugtraq - activestate people, see the archives]

On Tue, May 18, 2004 at 03:23:16PM -0700, Drew Copley wrote:

> The beauty of holes in perl itself is the possibility that
> it could affect a widerange of perl scripts out there sleeping on
> people's webservers, though.

This isn't really a hole in perl itself, but in the particular build of
perl compiled and shipped by one particular vendor. I can not replicate
this on OpenBSD, Debian Linux, or Solaris. Nor can I replicate it using
the version of perl supplied with Cygwin.

I'd be interested to hear if a similar bug exists in Activestate's build
of perl for Linux and Solaris, which I didn't try.

In any case, if an attacker can inject his choice of data into a
system() function, then all bets are off so this is not something that
the users should worry too much about.

--
David Cantrell | Benevolent Dictator | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

<davorg> clowns are scary
<gbjk> I concur. It's their motivation that worries me.
    -- in #london.pm