CVE-2026-13221
Description
Perl versions through 5.43.9 produce silently incorrect regular expression matches when an alternation of more than 65535 fixed string branches is compiled into a trie in Perl_study_chunk. When such branches are combined into a trie, the delta between the first branch and the shared tail is stored in a 16-bit field. A branch count above 65535 overflows the field, and the trie's match decision table is truncated with no warning or error. A pattern of this shape produces false positive matches (matching strings it should not) and false negative matches (failing to match strings it should). When such a pattern gates an access or filtering decision, the result is wrong.
How to fix CVE-2026-13221
No fixed version has been published yet. Mitigate by removing the affected package or applying upstream guidance from the references below.
- —no fix listed
Is CVE-2026-13221 being exploited?
Low — EPSS is 0.6%, meaning exploitation activity has not been observed at scale.
Affected packages (1)
- from 0
CVSS scores
| Source | Version | Severity | Vector |
|---|---|---|---|
| osv | CVSS 3.1 | CRITICAL9.1 | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H |