PHP is een zogenoemde hypertext preprocessor en wordt voornamelijk gebruikt om dynamische content in de opmaaktaal HTML serverside te genereren. De software wordt veelal gebruikt in combinatie met het databaseprogramma MySQL, waarmee de dynamische content van websites en forums worden geserveerd. De ontwikkelaars van The PHP Group hebben recent versie 4.4.5 vrijgegeven op het wereld wijde web. Hiermee worden een aantal beveiligingslekken gedicht waardoor iedereen die nog de 4.x-tak gebruikt aangeraden wordt om te upgraden naar deze uitgave. De aankondiging van PHP 4.4.5 ziet er als volgt uit:
The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.4.5. This release is a stability and security enhancement of the 4.4.X branch, and all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to it as soon as possible.
Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 4.4.5:The majority of the security vulnerabilities discovered and resolved can in most cases be only abused by local users and cannot be triggered remotely. However, some of the above issues can be triggered remotely in certain situations, or exploited by malicious local users on shared hosting setups utilizing PHP as an Apache module. Therefore, we strongly advise all users of PHP, regardless of the version to upgrade to 4.4.5 release as soon as possible. PHP 5.2.1 with equivalent security corrections is available as well.
- Fixed possible safe_mode & open_basedir bypasses inside the session extension.
- Fixed unserialize() abuse on 64 bit systems with certain input strings.
- Fixed possible overflows and stack corruptions in the session extension.
- Fixed an underflow inside the internal sapi_header_op() function.
- Fixed possible overflows inside zip & imap extensions.
- Fixed non-validated resource destruction inside the shmop extension.
- Fixed a possible overflow in the str_replace() function.
- Fixed possible clobbering of super-globals in several code paths.
- Fixed a possible information disclosure inside the wddx extension.
- Fixed a possible string format vulnerability in *print() functions on 64 bit systems.
- Fixed a possible buffer overflow inside ibase_{delete,add,modify}_user() function.
- Fixed a string format vulnerability inside the odbc_result_all() function.
- Fixed a possible buffer overflow inside mail() function on Windows.
In addition to the security fixes, this release includes a number of non-security related bug fixes.