Critical CVSS 9.1
CVE-2026-57074
XML::Bare versions through 0.53 for Perl have an unbounded character lookahead. The parserc_parse function attempts to check for multicharacter strings such as "<![CDATA" or element terminators such as ">" without checking that the offsets are within the buffer. Truncated strings such as "<a/" can trigger an out-of-bounds read.
What this means
- Exposure
- Exploitable remotely over the network, without authentication and with no action from the victim.
- Impact
- An attacker can read sensitive data and take the service offline.
- Weakness
- An out-of-bounds read exposes adjacent memory, often leftover secrets.
- Likelihood
- Its EPSS score stays low: nothing points to imminent exploitation, which is no reason to leave it unpatched.
What to doPatch without waiting for the next scheduled cycle. Start with the instances exposed to the internet.
Read automatically from the CVSS vector, the weakness type (CWE) and the EPSS score. The technical description above remains the one published by NIST.