CVE-2026-15534
Perl versions through 5.45.1 have out-of-bounds heap reads and writes during regular expression matching via an undersized superlinear cache in S_regmatch. The regex engine's superlinear cache holds one bit per subject position for each participating WHILEM node, so the bit count is the subject length plus one times the number of nodes. Nothing checks that product for positive overflow of the signed 32-bit count: a 286331153 byte subject matched against a pattern with 15 participating nodes stores the count as 14, leaving a two byte cache. The cache is then indexed from the real match position and node number, so reads go past the end of the allocation, and on failure CACHEsayNO sets a bit past it. A caller that matches an attacker controlled subject of this size against a pattern of this shape can crash the process or corrupt heap memory.
- Affected products
- Perl
- CVSS 3.1
- 5.7 MEDIUM
- EPSS
- 0.2% (6th percentile)
- Weakness
- CWE-125, CWE-190, CWE-787
- NVD status
- Received
- Published
- 2026-08-09
Fix
Upgrade to a future Perl release, or apply the upstream patches.
No indexed exploits for CVE-2026-15534 yet
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No exploit for CVE-2026-15534 has been indexed yet. Our index is built from live traffic and upstream syncs, so this page can only say what it knows — not that no exploit exists.