A security issue and some vulnerabilities have been reported in PHP, where one has unknown impacts and others can be exploited by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions and cause a DoS (Denial of Service) and by malicious users to bypass certain security restrictions.

1) The vulnerability is caused due to an error within the "php_filter_validate_email()" function in the ext/filter/logical_filters.c, when validating email addresses. This can be exploited to cause a stack overflow and cause a crash via an overly long string.

2) The security issue is caused due to the "utf8_decode()" function incorrectly decoding certain UTF-8 sequences. This can be exploited to e.g. bypass security filters and subsequently conduct cross-site scripting and SQL injection attacks.

3) A vulnerability is caused due to a double-free error within the "php_imap_do_open()" function in ext/imap/php_imap.c of the IMAP extension.

4) An error in the "php_check_specific_open_basedir()" function (fopen_wrappers.c) can be exploited to bypass the "open_basedir" restrictions when a long path string is compared to a restricted directory.

5) A NULL-pointer dereference error in the "ZipArchive::getArchiveComment()" method when extracting archive comments can be exploited to cause a crash.

6) A NULL-pointer dereference error in the "php_zip_extract_file()" function (ext/zip/php_zip.c) can be exploited to cause a crash.

7) An integer overflow error in the "NumberFormatter::getSymbol()" method ("numfmt_get_symbol()") can be exploited to cause a crash.

8) A boundary error in the "imagepstext()" function of the GD extension can be exploited to cause a stack-based buffer overflow via specially crafted parameters.

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability may allow execution of arbitrary code.

NOTE: Additionally, a weakness exists in e.g. "file_exists()" function when processing strings containing NULL bytes and may result in checks being performed on an unintended file.

The security issue and the vulnerabilities are reported in version 5.3.3. Other versions may also be affected.

Solution
Update to version 5.2.15 and 5.3.4.

Provided and/or discovered by
1,4,6) Reported by the vendor.
2) Originally reported by the webmaster at lapstore.de.
3) The vendor credits Mateusz Kocielski.
5,7) Maksymilian Arciemowicz.
8) Martin Barbella.

Changelog
Further details available in Customer Area

Original Advisory
1) http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52929
2) http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.utf8-decode.php#83935
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=48230
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=49687
3) http://svn.php.net/viewvc?view=revision&revision=305032
8) http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=53492

PHP:
http://www.php.net/archive/2010.php#id2010-12-10-1
http://www.php.net/archive/2010.php#id2010-12-09-1

Maksymilian Arciemowicz:
http://securityreason.com/achievement_securityalert/90
http://securityreason.com/achievement_securityalert/91

Martin Barbella:
http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2010-12/0181.html

Other references
Further details available in Customer Area

Deep Links
Links available in Customer Area