Heap Overflow in Perl DBI Library

Impact Analysis

A heap overflow vulnerability can lead to unpredictable behavior such as application crashes, data corruption, or potentially allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code.

In this case, if an attacker can supply SQL statements with an extremely large number of placeholders, it may trigger the overflow, compromising the stability or security of the application using DBI.

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Executive Summary

This vulnerability affects DBI versions before 1.650 for Perl. It is a heap overflow issue that occurs when preparsing SQL statements containing an extremely large number of placeholders.

The previous fix for a related vulnerability (CVE-2026-10879) did not allocate enough memory to handle around 1.2 million placeholders, which could lead to this overflow.

DBI version 1.650 addresses this by setting a hard limit of 99,999 placeholders to prevent the overflow.

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Mitigation Strategies

To mitigate this vulnerability, upgrade DBI to version 1.650 or later, which sets a hard limit of 99,999 placeholders to prevent heap overflow issues.

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Detection Guidance

This vulnerability involves the Perl DBI library versions before 1.650, specifically when SQL statements contain an extreme number of '?' placeholders exceeding 99,999.

To detect if your system is vulnerable, first check the installed version of the Perl DBI module.

• Run the command: perl -MDBI -e 'print $DBI::VERSION, "\n"' to display the installed DBI version.

If the version is below 1.650, your system may be vulnerable.

To detect if SQL statements with excessive placeholders are being used, you can audit your application logs or database query logs for queries containing a very large number of '?' placeholders.

There is no specific network command or signature provided in the resources to detect exploitation attempts directly.

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