CVE-2020-10878 — Perl before 5

Perl before 5.30.3 has an integer overflow related to mishandling of a "PL_regkind[OP(n)] == NOTHING" situation. A crafted regular expression could lead to malformed bytecode with a possibility of instruction injection.

01What is this vulnerability?

Perl before 5.30.3 has an integer overflow related to mishandling of a "PL_regkind[OP(n)] == NOTHING" situation. A crafted regular expression could lead to malformed bytecode with a possibility of instruction injection.

02Affected products

No structured affected-product list available — see references below for vendor advisories.

03Active exploitation status

Not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. EPSS is the best forward-looking signal — see the EPSS row above.

04Recommended remediation

• Patch to a fixed version listed in the vendor advisory (see references below).
• Mitigate with WAF rules, network egress filters, or feature flags where the patch is not yet available.
• Hunt historical logs for exploitation indicators — see Detection signatures below.

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

Ask SARA in chat to draft a starting detection for this CVE in your stack of choice.

07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

• Published: 2020-06-05T14:15:10.527
• Last modified: 2026-10-14T09:17:17.657

09References

• lists.opensuse.org — http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-06/msg00044.html
• github.com — https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/pod/perl5303delta.pod
• github.com — https://github.com/Perl/perl5/compare/v5.30.2...v5.30.3
• github.com — https://github.com/perl/perl5/commit/0a320d753fe7fca03df259a4dfd8e641e51edaa8
• github.com — https://github.com/perl/perl5/commit/3295b48defa0f8570114877b063fe546dd348b3c
• lists.fedoraproject.org — https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedorapro…
• security.gentoo.org — https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202006-03
• security.netapp.com — https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20200611-0001/
• www.oracle.com — https://www.oracle.com//security-alerts/cpujul2021.html
• www.oracle.com — https://www.oracle.com/security-alerts/cpuApr2021.html