Synopsis
The Unity Linux host is missing one or more security updates.
Description
The Unity Linux 20 host has a package installed that is affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the UTSA-2026-141786 advisory.
Date::Manip versions through 7.00 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via quadratic backtracking in the unanchored time substitution in _parse_time.
_parse_time removes a time from anywhere in the string with the unanchored substitution `s/$timerx/ /`, where $timerx is an auto-generated alternation of time patterns reached through a leading `(?:$atrx|^|\s+)`. The engine therefore retries the match at every position of an interior whitespace run:
at each start position the leading `\s+` consumes the rest of the run greedily, the time alternation fails because the run holds no digits, and the engine backtracks a space at a time across the run before advancing the start position, which is quadratic in the length of the run. No time need be present in the string for this to happen, only a long run of whitespace, and the parse time rises about fourfold for each doubling of the run: a few kilobytes of whitespace costs seconds of CPU per parse and tens of kilobytes costs minutes.
Any caller that passes an untrusted string of unbounded length to ParseDate(), Date::Manip::Date->parse() or ->parse_time() can be made to spend unbounded CPU in a single parse, a denial of service.
Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Unity Linux security advisory.
Note that Nessus has not tested for this issue but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.
Solution
Update the affected perl-Date-Manip package.
Plugin Details
File Name: unity_linux_UTSA-2026-141786.nasl
Supported Sensors: Nessus
Risk Information
Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C
Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:U/RL:O/RC:C
Vulnerability Information
Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/cpu, Host/UOS-Server/release, Host/UOS-Server/rpm-list
Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available
Patch Publication Date: 10/20/2026
Vulnerability Publication Date: 7/30/2026