Secunia

Several vulnerabilities and weaknesses have been reported in PHP, where some have unknown impacts and others can be exploited by malicious users to manipulate certain data, disclose potentially sensitive information, bypass certain security restrictions, or to cause a DoS (Denial of Service), and potentially by malicious people to compromise a vulnerable system.

1) An input validation error in the "ftp_putcmd()" function can be exploited to inject newline characters.

2) An unspecified error in the "import_request_variables()" can be exploited to overwrite global variables.

3) An unspecified error can remotely be exploited to cause a buffer overflow within in the "make_http_soap_request()" function (PHP 5).

4) An unspecified error can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow within the "user_filter_factory_create()" function (PHP 5).

5) An unspecified error in the bundled libxmlrpc library can remotely be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow and may allow execution of arbitrary code.

6) An input validation error in the "mail()" function allows injection of headers via the "To" and "Subject" parameters.

7) An error in the "mail()" function allows to truncate messages via ASCIIZ bytes.

8) The "safe_mode" and "open_basedir" protection mechanisms can be bypassed via the "zip://" and "bzip://" wrappers.

9) An integer overflow exists in "substr_compare()", which can be exploited to read memory from memory behind PHP variables. The "substr_count" function is reportedly also affected.

10) An error in the "mb_parse_str()" can be exploited to activate "register_globals".

11) An error in the Zend engine related to nested array variables that can be exploited to crash a PHP application.

12) A weakness is caused due to the use of an uninitialized variable when calling "php_rand_r()" within the "mcrypt_create_iv()" function of the mcrypt module if MCRYPT_RAND is passed as a parameter, which may result in a weaker encryption (PHP 5).

NOTE: Some issues can be triggered remotely under certain circumstances.

Solution
Update to version 5.2.2 or 4.4.7. Grant only trusted users permission to execute PHP code.

Provided and/or discovered by
The vendor credits:
1) loveshell
2) Stefano Di Paola and Steffan Esser
3, 4) Ilia Alshanetsky
5) Stanislav Malyshev
6-11) Stefan Esser
12) John Hargrove

Changelog
Further details available in Customer Area

Original Advisory
PHP:
http://www.php.net/releases/5_2_2.php
http://www.php.net/releases/4_4_7.php

MOPB:
http://www.php-security.org/MOPB/MOPB-03-2007.html
http://www.php-security.org/MOPB/MOPB-14-2007.html
http://www.php-security.org/MOPB/MOPB-20-2007.html
http://www.php-security.org/MOPB/MOPB-21-2007.html
http://www.php-security.org/MOPB/MOPB-26-2007.html
http://www.php-security.org/MOPB/MOPB-33-2007.html
http://www.php-security.org/MOPB/MOPB-34-2007.html

Deep Links
Links available in Customer Area