Secunia

Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in PHP, which can be exploited to gain escalated privileges, bypass certain security restrictions, gain knowledge of sensitive information, or compromise a vulnerable system.

1) An integer overflow in the "pack()" function can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow by passing some specially crafted parameters to the function.

Successful exploitation bypasses the safe_mode feature and allows execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the web server.

2) An integer overflow in the "unpack()" function can be exploited to leak information stored on the heap by passing specially crafted parameters to the function.

In combination with the first vulnerability, this may also allow bypassing of heap canary protection mechanisms.

3) An error within safe_mode when executing commands can be exploited to bypass the safe_mode_exec_dir restriction by injecting shell commands into the current directory name.

Successful exploitation requires that PHP runs on a multi-threaded Unix web server.

4) An error in safe_mode combined with certain implementations of "realpath()" can be exploited to bypass safe_mode via a specially crafted file path.

5) An error within the handling of file paths may potentially lead to file inclusion vulnerabilities. The problem is that "realpath()", which in some implementations truncate filenames, is used in various places to obtain the real path of a file.

6) Various errors within the deserialization code can be exploited to disclose information or execute arbitrary code via specially crafted strings passed to the "unserialize()" function.

7) A signedness error in the "shmop_write()" function can be exploited to write data to arbitrary memory locations by passing an overly large value to the "offset" parameter.

Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the web server and bypass the safe_mode restrictions.

8) An unspecified boundary error exists in the "exif_read_data()" function when handling long section names.

9) An error in the "addslashes()" function causes it to not escape NULL bytes correctly. This can e.g. be exploited to read arbitrary files on a system, if the "include()" or "require()" statements partly use user-supplied input.

10) An error within "magic_quotes_gpc" may allow a one-level directory traversal when uploading files with a single quote in the filename (e.g. "..'file.ext").

NOTE: Other potential security issues have also been reported.

Solution
Update to version 4.3.10 or 5.0.3.
Further details available in Customer Area

Provided and/or discovered by
1-6) Stefan Esser
6) Marcus Boerger
7) Stefano Di Paola
8) Reported by vendor.
9-10) Daniel Fabian

Changelog
Further details available in Customer Area

Original Advisory
PHP:
http://www.php.net/release_4_3_10.php

Stefan Esser:
http://www.hardened-php.net/advisories/012004.txt

Deep Links
Links available in Customer Area