Description
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).
Remediation
Upgrade PHP to the latest version.
References
Related Vulnerabilities
WordPress Plugin Archive Posts Sort Customize Cross-Site Scripting (1.5)
WordPress Plugin Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode Page PHP Object Injection (1.42)
WordPress Plugin Blue Admin Cross-Site Request Forgery (21.06.01)
WordPress Plugin Easy PayPal Gift Certificate Multiple Vulnerabilities (1.2.3)
WordPress Plugin PayPal for WooCommerce Security Bypass (1.5.7)