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NAME

perl5144delta - what is new for perl v5.14.4

DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.14.3 release and the 5.14.4 release.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.12.0, first read perl5140delta,
which describes differences between 5.12.0 and 5.14.0.

Core Enhancements

No changes since 5.14.0.

Security

This release contains one major, and medium, and a number of minor security fixes. The
latter are included mainly to allow the test suite to pass cleanly with the clang
compiler's address sanitizer facility.

CVE-2013-1667: memory exhaustion with arbitrary hash keys
With a carefully crafted set of hash keys (for example arguments on a URL), it is possible
to cause a hash to consume a large amount of memory and CPU, and thus possibly to achieve
a Denial-of-Service.

This problem has been fixed.

memory leak in Encode
The UTF-8 encoding implementation in Encode.xs had a memory leak which has been fixed.

[perl #111594] Socket::unpack_sockaddr_un heap-buffer-overflow
A read buffer overflow could occur when copying "sockaddr" buffers. Fairly harmless.

This problem has been fixed.

[perl #111586] SDBM_File: fix off-by-one access to global ".dir"
An extra byte was being copied for some string literals. Fairly harmless.

This problem has been fixed.

off-by-two error in List::Util
A string literal was being used that included two bytes beyond the end of the string.
Fairly harmless.

This problem has been fixed.

[perl #115994] fix segv in regcomp.c:S_join_exact()
Under debugging builds, while marking optimised-out regex nodes as type "OPTIMIZED", it
could treat blocks of exact text as if they were nodes, and thus SEGV. Fairly harmless.

This problem has been fixed.

[perl #115992] PL_eval_start use-after-free
The statement "local $[;", when preceded by an "eval", and when not part of an assignment,
could crash. Fairly harmless.

This problem has been fixed.

wrap-around with IO on long strings
Reading or writing strings greater than 2**31 bytes in size could segfault due to integer
wraparound.

This problem has been fixed.

Incompatible Changes

There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.14.0. If any exist, they are bugs
and reports are welcome.

Deprecations

There have been no deprecations since 5.14.0.

Modules and Pragmata

New Modules and Pragmata
None

Updated Modules and Pragmata
The following modules have just the minor code fixes as listed above in "Security"
(version numbers have not changed):

Socket
SDBM_File
List::Util

Encode has been upgraded from version 2.42_01 to version 2.42_02.

Module::CoreList has been updated to version 2.49_06 to add data for this release.

Removed Modules and Pragmata
None.

Documentation

New Documentation
None.

Changes to Existing Documentation
None.

Diagnostics

No new or changed diagnostics.

Utility Changes

None

Configuration and Compilation

No changes.

Platform Support

New Platforms
None.

Discontinued Platforms
None.

Platform-Specific Notes
VMS 5.14.3 failed to compile on VMS due to incomplete application of a patch series that
allowed "userelocatableinc" and "usesitecustomize" to be used simultaneously. Other
platforms were not affected and the problem has now been corrected.

Selected Bug Fixes

· In Perl 5.14.0, "$tainted ~~ @array" stopped working properly. Sometimes it would
erroneously fail (when $tainted contained a string that occurs in the array after the
first element) or erroneously succeed (when "undef" occurred after the first element)
[perl #93590].

Known Problems

None.

Acknowledgements

Perl 5.14.4 represents approximately 5 months of development since Perl 5.14.3 and
contains approximately 1,700 lines of changes across 49 files from 12 authors.

Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant community of users
and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that
became Perl 5.14.4:

Andy Dougherty, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Christian Hansen, Craig A. Berry, Dave Rolsky,
David Mitchell, Dominic Hargreaves, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, Reini Urban,
Ricardo Signes, Yves Orton.

The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically generated from
version control history. In particular, it does not include the names of the (very much
appreciated) contributors who reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.

For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors, please see the AUTHORS
file in the Perl source distribution.

Reporting Bugs

If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles recently posted to the
comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug database at http://rt.perl.org/perlbug/ .
There may also be information at http://www.perl.org/ , the Perl Home Page.

If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug program included with
your release. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug
report, along with the output of "perl -V", will be sent off to [email protected] to be
analysed by the Perl porting team.

If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it inappropriate to
send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please send it to
[email protected]. This points to a closed subscription unarchived mailing
list, which includes all the core committers, who be able to help assess the impact of
issues, figure out a resolution, and help co-ordinate the release of patches to mitigate
or fix the problem across all platforms on which Perl is supported. Please only use this
address for security issues in the Perl core, not for modules independently distributed on
CPAN.

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