PHP HTML Entity Encoder Heap Overflow Vulnerability

PHP HTML Entity Encoder Heap Overflow Vulnerability

Published on 2006-11-03. Updated on 2007-03-20.

Description:

This alert was generated using only banner information. It may be a false positive.

Stefan Esser reported some vulnerabilities in PHP, which can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service) or potentially compromise a vulnerable system.The vulnerabilities are caused due to boundary errors within the "htmlentities()" and "htmlspecialchars()" functions. If a PHP application uses these functions to process user-supplied input, this can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow by passing specially crafted data to the affected application. Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code, but requires that the UTF-8 character set is selected. For a detailed explanation of the vulnerability read the referenced article.
Vendor has released PHP 5.2.0 which fixes this issue.

Affected PHP versions (up to 4.4.4/5.1.6).

Impact:
Denial of service, remote code execution.

Recommendation:
Upgrade PHP to the latest version.

Tags: Scripts

Alert Tags: configuration
ApplicableApplicationServer : PHP
ApplicableOS: All
ApplicableWebServer: All

References:

  • PHP HTML Entity Encoder Heap Overflow Vulnerability
  • PHP Homepage

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