[NEWS] Additional Details Released on PHP Security Vulnerability in Multipart FORM Data Handling

From: support@securiteam.com
Date: 07/22/02 

From: support@securiteam.com
To: list@securiteam.com
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2002 18:27:55 +0200 (CEST)

The following security advisory is sent to the securiteam mailing list, and can be found at the SecuriTeam web site: http://www.securiteam.com
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  Additional Details Released on PHP Security Vulnerability in Multipart
FORM Data Handling
------------------------------------------------------------------------

SUMMARY

As we reported in our previous advisory:
<http://www.securiteam.com/securitynews/5XP0N0K7PY.html> PHP Security
Vulnerability in Multipart FORM Data Handling, a security vulnerability in
PHP would allow attackers to cause the product to execute arbitrary code.

DETAILS

Vulnerable systems:
 * PHP version 4.2.0
 * PHP version 4.2.1

Immune systems:
 * PHP version 4.2.2

PHP 4.2.0 introduced a completely rewritten multipart/form-data POST
handler. A malformed POST request can trigger an error condition that is
not correctly handled. Due to this bug, it could happen that an
uninitialised struct is appended to a linked list of mime headers. When
the list is cleaned or destroyed PHP tries to free the pointers that are
expected in the struct. Because of the lack of initialization, these
pointers contain stuff that was left on the stack by previous function
calls.

On the IA32 architecture (a.k.a. x86) it is not possible to control what
will end up in the uninitialised struct because of the stack layout. All
possible code paths leave illegal addresses within the struct and PHP will
crash when it tries to free them.

Unfortunately, the situation is different if you look on a Solaris Sparc
installation. Here it is possible for an attacker to free chunks of memory
that are full under his control. This is most probably the case for
several more non-IA32 architectures.

Please note that exploitability is not only limited to systems that are
running malloc()/free() implementations that are known to be vulnerable to
control structure overwrites. This is because the internal PHP memory
management implements its own linked list system that can be used to
overwrite nearly arbitrary memory addresses.

Recommendation:
If you are running PHP 4.2.x, you should upgrade as soon as possible,
especially if your server runs on a non IA32 CPU. If you cannot upgrade
for whatever reason the only way to workaround this, is to disable all
kinds of POST requests on your server.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The information has been provided by <mailto:security@e-matters.de>
e-matters Security.

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