Yves Orton discovered a flaw in the rehashing code of Perl. This flaw could be exploited to carry out a denial of service attack against code that uses arbitrary user input as hash keys. Specifically an attacker could create a set of keys of a hash causing a denial of service via memory exhaustion.

For the stable distribution (squeeze), this problem has been fixed in version 5.10.1-17squeeze6 of perl and version 2.0.4-7+squeeze1 of libapache2-mod-perl2. For the testing distribution (wheezy), and the unstable distribution (sid), this problem has been fixed in version 5.14.2-19 of perl and version 2.0.7-3 of libapache2-mod-perl2. We recommend that you upgrade your perl and libapache2-mod-perl2 packages.

An interpreted scripting language, known among some as 'Unix's Swiss Army Chainsaw'.

perl on Debian Linux

This check tests the installed software version using the apt package manager.

• http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2641.html

---

Updated on 2015-03-25