Skip to main content
← All vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-19487

Perl versions from 5.9.4 before 5.41.9 produce incorrect regular expression match results when a stale failure flag ends the Aho-Corasick prescan early in S_find_byclass

Published
Last modified
published
Not listed in CISA KEV
Fix
Fixed in 5.41.9
None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
  • Exploitation: poc
  • Automatable: yes
  • Technical impact: partial

Summary

Perl versions from 5.9.4 before 5.41.9 produce incorrect regular expression match results when a stale failure flag ends the Aho-Corasick prescan early in S_find_byclass. The prescan walks the subject for positions where the full pattern could match, and the engine tries it from the leftmost one recorded. A failing transition sets the failed flag, and a later successful transition does not clear it, so the prescan reads the stale flag as a failure and stops before it can record a candidate that starts earlier. It takes a subject where one candidate is recorded and a later character then forces a fallback through a fail link that succeeds. Example: "ABCDE" =~ m/ABCF|BCDE|C/; # matches C at offset 2, not BCDE "ABCDE" =~ m/ABCF|BCDE|C(G)/; # no match, BCDE missed An alternation like this can miss input it should match, or match it on the wrong branch, so an access or filtering decision made from the result can be wrong.

Timeline

  1. CVE published
  2. CISA SSVC assessment

    Exploitation: poc · Automatable: yes · Technical impact: partial

  3. Record last updated

Affected versions

  • perl

    From 5.9.4 · fixed in 5.41.9

References 2

GitHub · Perl/perl5