WWW::Mechanize::Cached versions before 2.00 for Perl deserialize cached HTTP responses from a world-writable on-disk cache, enabling local response forgery and code execution

CVE-2026-8612

What is CVE-2026-8612?

WWW::Mechanize::Cached versions before 2.00 for Perl deserialize cached HTTP responses from a world-writable on-disk cache, enabling local response forgery and code execution.

With no explicit cache backend, WWW::Mechanize::Cached constructs a default Cache::FileCache under /tmp/FileCache without overriding the backend's documented directory_umask of 000, so the cache root and its subdirectories are created mode 0777 with no sticky bit. Cache entries are named by sha1_hex of the request and read back through Storable::thaw on the next cache hit.

A local attacker with write access to the cache tree can replace a victim's cache entry for a known URL with an arbitrary frozen HTTP::Response blob, causing the victim's next get() of that URL to return attacker controlled response bytes. Because the bytes are passed to Storable::thaw, a victim process that has loaded any class with a side-effectful STORABLE_thaw, DESTROY, or overload hook can be escalated to arbitrary code execution.

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