Security 10748 Published by

The PHP Group has released PHP version 4.2.2 which fix a serious vulnerability in PHP versions 4.2.0 and 4.2.1



Description
PHP contains code for intelligently parsing the headers of HTTP POST requests. The code is used to differentiate between variables and files sent by the user agent in a "multipart/form-data" request. This parser has insufficient input checking, leading to the vulnerability.

The vulnerability is exploitable by anyone who can send HTTP POST requests to an affected web server. Both local and remote users, even from behind firewalls, may be able to gain privileged access.

Impact
Both local and remote users may exploit this vulnerability to compromise the web server and, under certain conditions, to gain privileged access. So far only the IA32 platform has been verified to be safe from the execution of arbitrary code. The vulnerability can still be used on IA32 to crash PHP and, in most cases, the web server.

Download