What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2016-1238

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2016-08-02 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-264

Description

(1) cpan/Archive-Tar/bin/ptar, (2) cpan/Archive-Tar/bin/ptardiff, (3) cpan/Archive-Tar/bin/ptargrep, (4) cpan/CPAN/scripts/cpan, (5) cpan/Digest-SHA/shasum, (6) cpan/Encode/bin/enc2xs, (7) cpan/Encode/bin/encguess, (8) cpan/Encode/bin/piconv, (9) cpan/Encode/bin/ucmlint, (10) cpan/Encode/bin/unidump, (11) cpan/ExtUtils-MakeMaker/bin/instmodsh, (12) cpan/IO-Compress/bin/zipdetails, (13) cpan/JSON-PP/bin/json_pp, (14) cpan/Test-Harness/bin/prove, (15) dist/ExtUtils-ParseXS/lib/ExtUtils/xsubpp, (16) dist/Module-CoreList/corelist, (17) ext/Pod-Html/bin/pod2html, (18) utils/c2ph.PL, (19) utils/h2ph.PL, (20) utils/h2xs.PL, (21) utils/libnetcfg.PL, (22) utils/perlbug.PL, (23) utils/perldoc.PL, (24) utils/perlivp.PL, and (25) utils/splain.PL in Perl 5.x before 5.22.3-RC2 and 5.24 before 5.24.1-RC2 do not properly remove . (period) characters from the end of the includes directory array, which might allow local users to gain privileges via a Trojan horse module under the current working directory.

Affected products

• Apache Software Foundation Apache SpamAssassin: before 3.4.2 — fixed in 3.4.2
• Debian Linux: 8.0
• Fedoraproject Fedora: 23, 24
• openSUSE Leap: 15.0
• perl: 1.0.15, 1.0.16, 5.000, 5.000o, 5.001, 5.001n (+242)

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Apache Software Foundation Apache SpamAssassin 3.4.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-08/msg00002.html
• http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/commit/cee96d52c39b1e7b36e1c62d38bcd8d86e9a41ab
• http://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3628
• http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2016/07/msg238271.html
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/92136
• http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1036440
• https://h20566.www2.hpe.com/portal/site/hpsc/public/kb/docDisplay?docId=emr_na-c05240731
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/7f6a16bc0fd0fd5e67c7fd95bd655069a2ac7d1f88e42d3c853e601c%40%3Cannounce.apache.org%3E
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2018/11/msg00016.html
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/2FBQOCV3GBAN2EYZUM3CFDJ4ECA3GZOK/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/DOFRQWJRP2NQJEYEWOMECVW3HAMD5SYN/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/TZBNQH3DMI7HDELJAZ4TFJJANHXOEDWH/

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