Security Vulnerability in Solaris 10 Perl 5.8

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Security Vulnerability in Solaris 10 Perl 5.8

1. Impact

An unprivileged local user may be able to cause a Perl application to crash, or possibly execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the Perl application due to a buffer overflow in the regular expression engine.

The ability to crash a Perl application is a type of Denial of Service (DoS). If the Perl application accepts input from remote users, the impact can be extended to include remote unprivileged users.

This issue is referenced in the following document:

    CVE-2007-5116 at http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2007-5116

2. Contributing Factors

This issue can occur in the following releases:

SPARC Platform

• Solaris 10 without patch 122239-03

x86 Platform

• Solaris 10 without patch 122240-03

Note: Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 are not affected by this issue.

This issue only affects Perl versions 5.8.0 and later. Solaris 10 ships with Perl 5.6.1 in "/usr/perl5/5.6.1/" and Perl 5.8.4 in "/usr/perl5/5.8.4/". The patches for this issue only apply to Perl 5.8.4.

3. Symptoms

There are no reliable symptoms that would indicate the described issue has been exploited to execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of the affected Perl application on a host. The symptoms of the Denial of Service would be the Perl application no longer running.

4. Workaround

To work around the described issue, check for and remove utf-8 characters from the user supplied input. However, exact steps would differ for each perl use case.

Or, use perl 5.6.1 instead, available on Solaris 10. Sites can modify the path to Perl to use Perl 5.6.1 rather than 5.8.4 in their scripts by changing the path to the Perl interpreter from /bin/perl or /usr/bin/perl or /usr/perl5/5.8.4/bin/perl to /usr/perl5/5.6.1/bin/perl.

Additional information can be found at http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/820-1259/fhkna?a=view

5. Resolution

This issue is addressed in the following releases:

SPARC Platform

• Solaris 10 with patch 122239-03 or later

x86 Platform

• Solaris 10 with patch 122240-03 or later

For more information on Security Sun Alerts, see Technical Instruction ID 213557.

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Modification History

28-Apr-2008: Updated Resolution section to add link for Security Technical Instruction doc
08-Aug-2008: Updated Contributing Factors and Resolution sections; now Resolved

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