YAML::Syck versions through 1.36 for Perl has several potential security vulnerabilities including a high-severity heap buffer overflow in the YAML emitter.
The heap overflow occurs when class names exceed the initial 512-byte allocation.
The base64 decoder could read past the buffer end on trailing newlines.
strtok mutated n->type_id in place, corrupting shared node data.
A memory leak occurred in syck_hdlr_add_anchor when a node already had an anchor. The incoming anchor string 'a' was leaked on early return.
YAML::Syck versions before 1.38 for Perl has an out-of-bounds read.
The base60 (sexagesimal) parsing code in perl_syck.h has a buffer underflow bug in both int#base60 and float#base60 handlers. When processing the leftmost segment of a colon-separated value (e.g., the 1 in 1:30:45), the inner while loop can decrement a pointer past the start of the string buffer:
while ( colon >= ptr && *colon != ':' )
{
colon--;
}
if ( *colon == ':' ) *colon = '\0'; // colon may be ptr-1 here
When no colon is found (final/leftmost segment), colon becomes ptr-1, and the subsequent *colon dereference reads one byte before the allocated buffer.