SOC status:Duty analyst on shift

UK Cyber Defence
VulnerabilityDeferred

CVE-2026-85644

An ordinary string's byte 12 is rarely SVt_PVAV so the guard croaks by luck, but an attacker-crafted string carrying 0x0b there passes, and the buffer is then used as an AV head, with AvARRAY taken from bytes 16-23 and its entries pushed onto the Perl…

HIGH 7.5EPSS 0.37%

Does this matter?

High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.37%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.

Description

XS::Parse::Infix versions from 0.40 through 0.49 for Perl treat a number as an array reference. The wrapper function XS::Parse::Infix generates for a list-associative infix operator checks whether arguments are array references, but it tests using SvRV() rather than SvROK(). SvRV() reads a union slot that only holds a referent once SvROK(sv) is true, so the guard never validates that it is a reference. For an IV or NV that slot holds the number itself, SvRV() returns the caller's value and SvTYPE() dereferences it at offset 12. This will generally result in a segmentation fault. An application that hands the wrapper a list built from decoded input (for example, from JSON) lets whoever supplies a number in that list choose the address that the interpreter dereferences. An ordinary string's byte 12 is rarely SVt_PVAV so the guard croaks by luck, but an attacker-crafted string carrying 0x0b there passes, and the buffer is then used as an AV head, with AvARRAY taken from bytes 16-23 and its entries pushed onto the Perl stack as live SVs. A simple proof-of-concept uses the zip operator: use Syntax::Operator::Zip 'zip'; my @args = ([1], 2); zip(@args);

CVSS 3.1
7.5 HIGHCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS
0.37% probability · 31th percentile
Public exploits
None in Exploit-DB
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness
CWE-125, CWE-843
Source
9b29abf9-4ab0-4765-b253-1875cd9b441e
EPSS trend
0%3%5%29 September 2026: 0.18%27 October 2026: 0.37%29 September 202627 October 2026

EPSS moved from 0.2% on 29 September 2026 to 0.4% on 27 October 2026.

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.