USN-2943-1: PCRE vulnerabilities

29 March 2016

PCRE could be made to crash or run programs if it processed a specially-crafted regular expression.

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Releases

Packages

  • pcre3 - Perl 5 Compatible Regular Expression Library

Details

It was discovered that PCRE incorrectly handled certain regular
expressions. A remote attacker could use this issue to cause applications
using PCRE to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute
arbitrary code.

Reduce your security exposure

Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 15.10
Ubuntu 14.04
Ubuntu 12.04

After a standard system update you need to restart applications using PCRE,
such as the Apache HTTP server and Nginx, to make all the necessary
changes.

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