Developers of Sympa

[Olivier Salaun - CRU <address@concealed>]

Hi Jerome,

Our development plateform does not have Perl 5.8 and we dont't have
much time to reproduce this problem on another server.

What we can do is to patch Sympa to keep only one '*' where many
consecutive are found in a search regexp.

We need to find a site that could validate the patch then.
Any volonteer having a Sympa server running with Perl 5.8 ?

Jérôme Marant wrote:
>   Here the nswer I got from a Perl coder, following the critical bug
>   related to a buffer overflow.
>
>   http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=165799
>
>   I'll try to get additional information.
> [...]
> >  Sympa, a Perl application, has a critical bug, see #165799.
> >  Its upstream who run 5.6 tried to reproduce the problem
> >  but failed. They told me they definitely think it is a
> >  Perl 5.8 regexp bug, but cannot provide more information.
> >  What should I do? Is it a known bug?
>
>
> Perl 5.8 is different.  The code does things differently.  Different methods
> are called.
>
> In short, you'll need to fix the code.
>
> In detail, install-info(from dpkg) had a similiar problem with perl 5.8.  The
> reason is that it had an unbounded {*} pattern, and with certain large inputs,
> would overflow the stack.  This is because in perl 5.8, more stack space is
> used, so the limit was reached sooner.  It was never reached with 5.6 and this
> particular input.
>
> Check the dpkg changelog to find the bug#.

--
Olivier Salaun
Comite Reseau des Universites