CVE-2026-74766
Received
Received - Intake
Heap Use-After-Free in Net::IDN::Punycode Perl Module
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-74766, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-09-22
Last updated on: 2026-09-22
Assigner: CPANSec
Description
Description
Net::IDN::Punycode versions from 2.301 before 2.590 for Perl allow a heap use-after-free via a decoded code point that reallocates the output buffer in decode_punycode.
The XS backend inserts each decoded code point into the string buffer of the scalar it returns. decode_punycode computes the insertion pointer first and only then grows the buffer when the code point does not fit. The growth reallocates the buffer and updates every pointer except the insertion pointer, so the move that follows and the write of the code point go through a freed pointer. The buffer starts at twice the label length, and a code point above U+FFFF takes four bytes in the output, so a label of such code points outgrows it and forces the reallocation.
Version 2.301, the fix for CVE-2016-15059, introduced the defect. Only the XS backend is affected.
Decoding an attacker-supplied punycode label reads and writes freed heap memory.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
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Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
Currently, no data is known.
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-416 | The product reuses or references memory after it has been freed. At some point afterward, the memory may be allocated again and saved in another pointer, while the original pointer references a location somewhere within the new allocation. Any operations using the original pointer are no longer valid because the memory "belongs" to the code that operates on the new pointer. |
