CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-49146 — App::Ack versions before 3.10.0 for Perl allow memory exhaustion via an unbounded context value in a project .ackrc

High CVSS 7.5

App::Ack versions before 3.10.0 for Perl allow memory exhaustion via an unbounded context value in a project .ackrc. ack searches up the directory hierarchy from the current directory for a project .ackrc and loads its options. The -B and -C context options accepted any positive integer, and ack sized the before-context buffer to that value, so a project .ackrc setting --before-context=100000000 made ack allocate a buffer of 100 million elements. A project .ackrc committed to an untrusted repository can abort ack with an out-of-memory condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2026-07-08
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-770

Affected products

No browser-safe affected-product rows are available.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.