Ubuntu Security Notice USN-222-2
12th December, 2005
perl vulnerability
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
- Ubuntu 5.10
- Ubuntu 5.04
- Ubuntu 4.10
Details
USN-222-1 fixed a vulnerability in the Perl interpreter. It was
discovered that the version of USN-222-1 was not sufficient to handle
all possible cases of malformed input that could lead to arbitrary
code execution, so another update is necessary.
Original advisory:
Jack Louis of Dyad Security discovered that Perl did not
sufficiently check the explicit length argument in format strings.
Specially crafted format strings with overly large length arguments
led to a crash of the Perl interpreter or even to execution of
arbitrary attacker-defined code with the privileges of the user
running the Perl program.
However, this attack was only possible in insecure Perl programs
which use variables with user-defined values in string
interpolations without checking their validity.
Update instructions
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package version:
- Ubuntu 5.10:
- perl-base
- libperl5.8
- Ubuntu 5.04:
- perl-base
- libperl5.8
- Ubuntu 4.10:
- perl-base
- libperl5.8
To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.
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