Security Advisories (8)
CVE-2020-12723 (2020-06-05)

regcomp.c in Perl before 5.30.3 allows a buffer overflow via a crafted regular expression because of recursive S_study_chunk calls.

CVE-2020-10878 (2020-06-05)

Perl before 5.30.3 has an integer overflow related to mishandling of a "PL_regkind[OP(n)] == NOTHING" situation. A crafted regular expression could lead to malformed bytecode with a possibility of instruction injection.

CVE-2020-10543 (2020-06-05)

Perl before 5.30.3 on 32-bit platforms allows a heap-based buffer overflow because nested regular expression quantifiers have an integer overflow.

CVE-2018-6798 (2018-04-17)

An issue was discovered in Perl 5.22 through 5.26. Matching a crafted locale dependent regular expression can cause a heap-based buffer over-read and potentially information disclosure.

CVE-2023-47100

In Perl before 5.38.2, S_parse_uniprop_string in regcomp.c can write to unallocated space because a property name associated with a \p{...} regular expression construct is mishandled. The earliest affected version is 5.30.0.

CVE-2024-56406 (2025-04-13)

A heap buffer overflow vulnerability was discovered in Perl. When there are non-ASCII bytes in the left-hand-side of the `tr` operator, `S_do_trans_invmap` can overflow the destination pointer `d`.    $ perl -e '$_ = "\x{FF}" x 1000000; tr/\xFF/\x{100}/;'    Segmentation fault (core dumped) It is believed that this vulnerability can enable Denial of Service and possibly Code Execution attacks on platforms that lack sufficient defenses.

CVE-2025-40909 (2025-05-30)

Perl threads have a working directory race condition where file operations may target unintended paths. If a directory handle is open at thread creation, the process-wide current working directory is temporarily changed in order to clone that handle for the new thread, which is visible from any third (or more) thread already running. This may lead to unintended operations such as loading code or accessing files from unexpected locations, which a local attacker may be able to exploit. The bug was introduced in commit 11a11ecf4bea72b17d250cfb43c897be1341861e and released in Perl version 5.13.6

CVE-2023-47039 (2023-10-30)

Perl for Windows relies on the system path environment variable to find the shell (cmd.exe). When running an executable which uses Windows Perl interpreter, Perl attempts to find and execute cmd.exe within the operating system. However, due to path search order issues, Perl initially looks for cmd.exe in the current working directory. An attacker with limited privileges can exploit this behavior by placing cmd.exe in locations with weak permissions, such as C:\ProgramData. By doing so, when an administrator attempts to use this executable from these compromised locations, arbitrary code can be executed.

NAME

AnyDBM_File - provide framework for multiple DBMs

NDBM_File, DB_File, GDBM_File, SDBM_File, ODBM_File - various DBM implementations

SYNOPSIS

use AnyDBM_File;

DESCRIPTION

This module is a "pure virtual base class"--it has nothing of its own. It's just there to inherit from one of the various DBM packages. It prefers ndbm for compatibility reasons with Perl 4, then Berkeley DB (See DB_File), GDBM, SDBM (which is always there--it comes with Perl), and finally ODBM. This way old programs that used to use NDBM via dbmopen() can still do so, but new ones can reorder @ISA:

BEGIN { @AnyDBM_File::ISA = qw(DB_File GDBM_File NDBM_File) }
use AnyDBM_File;

Having multiple DBM implementations makes it trivial to copy database formats:

use Fcntl; use NDBM_File; use DB_File;
tie %newhash,  'DB_File', $new_filename, O_CREAT|O_RDWR;
tie %oldhash,  'NDBM_File', $old_filename, 1, 0;
%newhash = %oldhash;

DBM Comparisons

Here's a partial table of features the different packages offer:

                         odbm    ndbm    sdbm    gdbm    bsd-db
			 ----	 ----    ----    ----    ------
 Linkage comes w/ perl   yes     yes     yes     yes     yes
 Src comes w/ perl       no      no      yes     no      no
 Comes w/ many unix os   yes     yes[0]  no      no      no
 Builds ok on !unix      ?       ?       yes     yes     ?
 Code Size               ?       ?       small   big     big
 Database Size           ?       ?       small   big?    ok[1]
 Speed                   ?       ?       slow    ok      fast
 FTPable                 no      no      yes     yes     yes
 Easy to build          N/A     N/A      yes     yes     ok[2]
 Size limits             1k      4k      1k[3]   none    none
 Byte-order independent  no      no      no      no      yes
 Licensing restrictions  ?       ?       no      yes     no
[0]

on mixed universe machines, may be in the bsd compat library, which is often shunned.

[1]

Can be trimmed if you compile for one access method.

[2]

See DB_File. Requires symbolic links.

[3]

By default, but can be redefined.

SEE ALSO

dbm(3), ndbm(3), DB_File(3), perldbmfilter