tl;dr EXPLOIT ALL THE PERL. AGAIN. After last year’s Perl crackdown, I decided I have to take the Perl abuse to the next level. This time I focused on Perl’s core, or more specifically, the referencing mechanism, and shattered the security of most Perl CGI projects in the world.
With more WATs, more broken concepts, and more wildly popular 0-days, we will finally prove the Perl language is a broken concept, one that stood tall for way too many years. Presenting „The Perl Jam: Exploiting a 20 Year-old Vulnerability“ at 31c3 opened a Pandora’s Box full of Perl debates and controversies. Many of these debates originated from the Perl community itself, with unforgiving arguments such as „vulnerabilities are the developer’s fault“, „RTFM“ and „I really hate the Camel abuse in the presentation“ that were mostly directed at me. This is why I’m proud to say that this year I finally got the message: Finding vulnerabilities in core modules is not enough. I need to prove there are problems in the most fundamental aspects of the Perl language, or the Perl community will keep ignoring the language many issues. So I did, and we are going to analyze it in a presentation filled with lolz, WATs, and 0-days, so maybe this time something will change. Join me for a journey in which we will delve into more 0-days in Bugzilla, an RCE on everyone who follows CGI.pm documentation, and precious WTF moments with basically any other CGI module in the world, including (but not limited to) Mojolicious, Catalyst and PSGI, affecting almost every Perl based CGI application in existence. I hope this talk will finally prove that developers are NOT the fault here, it’s the LANGUAGE, and its anti-intuitive, fail-prone ‚TMTOWTDI‘ syntax. btw, maybe it’s time to check your $$references ;)
Speakers: Netanel Rubin