The big deal is that the error message indicates an exploitable bug. This program has performed an illegal operation in Windows means that it tried to execute something that wasn't a command. That usually happens because there was a buffer overflow and Windows tried to execute something that wasn't valid machine code. However if you found what length the buffer overflow happens at and insert something that is valid machine code, arbitrary code can get executed.

Sure, the cause of the buffer overflow is obvious - there are limits on the length of path names and path name components. But, unlike on Unix, the potential error was nowhere checked or trapped, leading to the potential for exploits.

In this case Perl should definitely have a platform specific length check to avoid the bugginess of the underlying API leading to possible exploits in Perl code.

In reply to Re: Re: ActivateState crasher by tilly
in thread ActivePerl crasher by zude

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