Secunia

Some vulnerabilities have been reported in PHP, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct cross-site scripting attacks, bypass certain security restrictions, and potentially compromise a vulnerable system.

1) An error where the "GLOBALS" array is not properly protected, can be exploited to define global variables by sending a "multipart/form-data" POST request with a specially crafted file upload field, or via a script calling the PHP function "extract()" or "import_request_variables()".

Successful exploitation may open up for vulnerabilities in various applications, but requires that "register_globals" is enabled.

2) An error in the handling of an unexpected termination in the "parse_str()" PHP function, can be exploited to enable the "register_globals" directive for the current execution by e.g. triggering a memory_limit request shutdown in a script calling "parse_str()".

3) Some unspecified input passed to the "phpinfo()" PHP function isn't properly sanitised before being returned to the user. This can be exploited via a script calling "phpinfo()" to execute arbitrary HTML and script code in a user's browser session in context of an affected site.

4) An integer overflow error in pcrelib may be exploited to cause a memory corruption via a script calling a PHP function using the PCRE library where the regular expression can be controlled by the attacker.

For more information:
SA16502

Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code.

5) The problem is that it is possible to bypass the "safe_mode" and "open_basedir" protection mechanisms via the "ext/curl" and "ext/gd" modules.

6) An unspecified error in calling "virtual()" on Apache 2 can be exploited to bypass certain configuration directives (e.g. "safe_mode" and "open_basedir").

Other bugs have also been reported where some may be security related.

The vulnerabilities have been reported in versions 4.4.0 and 5.0.5. Prior versions may also be affected.

Solution
Update to version 4.4.1 or 5.1.0.
Further details available in Customer Area

Provided and/or discovered by
1-3) Stefan Esser, Hardened-PHP Project

Reported by vendor.

Changelog
Further details available in Customer Area

Original Advisory
Hardened-PHP Project:
http://www.hardened-php.net/advisory_202005.79.html
http://www.hardened-php.net/advisory_192005.78.html
http://www.hardened-php.net/advisory_182005.77.html
http://www.hardened-php.net/index.76.html

The PHP Group:
http://www.php.net/release_4_4_1.php
http://www.php.net/release_5_1_0.php

Other references
Further details available in Customer Area

Deep Links
Links available in Customer Area