The Perl Jam 2: The Camel Strikes Back

by Netanel Rubin

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 many language 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 😉