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=========================================================== Ubuntu Security Notice USN-222-1 December 02, 2005 perl vulnerability CVE-2005-3962 =========================================================== A security issue affects the following Ubuntu releases: Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog) Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog) Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) The following packages are affected: perl-base The problem can be corrected by upgrading the affected package to version 5.8.4-2ubuntu0.5 (for Ubuntu 4.10), 5.8.4-6ubuntu1.1 (for Ubuntu 5.04), or 5.8.7-5ubuntu1.1 (for Ubuntu 5.10). In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect the necessary changes. Details follow: 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.