Resource exhaustion in Petdance App::ack

CVE-2026-49146

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.

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 7.5 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.006 (47.5th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 48th percentile — 47.5% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-49146: held from 0.006 to 0.006.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.006 · newest: 0.006 · change: 0.000

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-49146?
CVE-2026-49146 is a high-severity vulnerability in Petdance App::ack, classified under Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling. CVSS score: 7.5/10. Published 2026-07-08.
How severe is CVE-2026-49146?
High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.5 out of 10.