builtin functionality, it can rely less upon external (and possibly
untrustworthy) programs to accomplish its purposes.
+=head1 SECURITY VULNERABILITY CONTACT INFORMATION
+
+If you believe you have found a security vulnerability in Perl, please email
+perl5-security-report@perl.org with details. This points to a closed
+subscription, unarchived mailing list. Please only use this address for
+security issues in the Perl core, not for modules independently distributed on
+CPAN.
+
+=head1 SECURITY MECHANISMS AND CONCERNS
+
+=head2 Taint mode
+
Perl automatically enables a set of special security checks, called I<taint
mode>, when it detects its program running with differing real and effective
user or group IDs. The setuid bit in Unix permissions is mode 04000, the
to call functions B<outside> your Perl code, such as POSIX::system,
in which case they are able to run arbitrary external code.
+=item *
+
+Hash keys are B<never> tainted.
+
=back
For efficiency reasons, Perl takes a conservative view of
Because taintedness is associated with each scalar value, some
elements of an array or hash can be tainted and others not.
-The keys of a hash are never tainted.
+The keys of a hash are B<never> tainted.
For example:
Fortunately, sometimes this kernel "feature" can be disabled.
Unfortunately, there are two ways to disable it. The system can simply
outlaw scripts with any set-id bit set, which doesn't help much.
-Alternately, it can simply ignore the set-id bits on scripts. If the
-latter is true, Perl can emulate the setuid and setgid mechanism when it
-notices the otherwise useless setuid/gid bits on Perl scripts. It does
-this via a special executable called F<suidperl> that is automatically
-invoked for you if it's needed.
+Alternately, it can simply ignore the set-id bits on scripts.
However, if the kernel set-id script feature isn't disabled, Perl will
complain loudly that your set-id script is insecure. You'll need to
should never have to specify this yourself. Most modern releases of
SysVr4 and BSD 4.4 use this approach to avoid the kernel race condition.
-Prior to release 5.6.1 of Perl, bugs in the code of F<suidperl> could
-introduce a security hole.
-
=head2 Protecting Your Programs
There are a number of ways to hide the source to your Perl programs,
language, not just Perl).
If you're concerned about people profiting from your code, then the
-bottom line is that nothing but a restrictive licence will give you
+bottom line is that nothing but a restrictive license will give you
legal security. License your software and pepper it with threatening
statements like "This is unpublished proprietary software of XYZ Corp.
Your access to it does not give you permission to use it blah blah
-blah." You should see a lawyer to be sure your licence's wording will
+blah." You should see a lawyer to be sure your license's wording will
stand up in court.
=head2 Unicode
makes generating such naughty hash keys harder.
See L<perlrun/PERL_HASH_SEED> for more information.
-The random perturbation is done by default but if one wants for some
-reason emulate the old behaviour one can set the environment variable
-PERL_HASH_SEED to zero (or any other integer). One possible reason
-for wanting to emulate the old behaviour is that in the new behaviour
-consecutive runs of Perl will order hash keys differently, which may
-confuse some applications (like Data::Dumper: the outputs of two
-different runs are no more identical).
+In Perl 5.8.1 the random perturbation was done by default, but as of
+5.8.2 it is only used on individual hashes if the internals detect the
+insertion of pathological data. If one wants for some reason emulate the
+old behaviour (and expose oneself to DoS attacks) one can set the
+environment variable PERL_HASH_SEED to zero to disable the protection
+(or any other integer to force a known perturbation, rather than random).
+One possible reason for wanting to emulate the old behaviour is that in the
+new behaviour consecutive runs of Perl will order hash keys differently,
+which may confuse some applications (like Data::Dumper: the outputs of two
+different runs are no longer identical).
B<Perl has never guaranteed any ordering of the hash keys>, and the
ordering has already changed several times during the lifetime of
=item *
-Regular expressions - Perl's regular expression engine is so called
-NFA (Non-Finite Automaton), which among other things means that it can
-rather easily consume large amounts of both time and space if the
+Regular expressions - Perl's regular expression engine is so called NFA
+(Non-deterministic Finite Automaton), which among other things means that
+it can rather easily consume large amounts of both time and space if the
regular expression may match in several ways. Careful crafting of the
regular expressions can help but quite often there really isn't much
one can do (the book "Mastering Regular Expressions" is required
Sorting - the quicksort algorithm used in Perls before 5.8.0 to
implement the sort() function is very easy to trick into misbehaving
-so that it consumes a lot of time. Nothing more is required than
-resorting a list already sorted. Starting from Perl 5.8.0 a different
-sorting algorithm, mergesort, is used. Mergesort is insensitive to
-its input data, so it cannot be similarly fooled.
+so that it consumes a lot of time. Starting from Perl 5.8.0 a different
+sorting algorithm, mergesort, is used by default. Mergesort cannot
+misbehave on any input.
=back
See L<http://www.cs.rice.edu/~scrosby/hash/> for more information,
-and any computer science text book on the algorithmic complexity.
+and any computer science textbook on algorithmic complexity.
=head1 SEE ALSO
https://perl5.git.perl.org / perl5.git / blobdiff