Critical (9.8) in perl perl. EPSS 0.5% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.
Perl versions before 5.40.5-RC1, from 5.41.0 before 5.42.3-RC1, from 5.43.0 before 5.43.11 have a heap buffer overflow when compiling regular expressions with a repeated fixed string on 32-bit builds.
Perl_study_chunk in regcomp_study.c checked the size of the joined substring buffer in characters rather than bytes. For a quantified fixed substring with a large minimum count, the byte length mincount * l could overflow SSize_t, producing an undersized SvGROW allocation; the subsequent copy writes past the end of the buffer.
A caller that compiles an attacker-controlled regular expression on a 32-bit perl build triggers a heap buffer overflow at compile time.
Severity
CVSS 3.1
9.8 critical
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
EPSS
0.5% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days; higher than 41% of CVEs (scores of 2026-10-31)