Moderate: php security and bug fix update

Updated php packages that fix several security issues and a bug are now
available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

This update has been rated as having moderate security impact by the Red
Hat Security Response Team.

PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language commonly used with the Apache
HTTP Web server.

It was discovered that the PHP escapeshellcmd() function did not properly
escape multi-byte characters which are not valid in the locale used by the
script. This could allow an attacker to bypass quoting restrictions imposed
by escapeshellcmd() and execute arbitrary commands if the PHP script was
using certain locales. Scripts using the default UTF-8 locale are not
affected by this issue. (CVE-2008-2051)

The PHP functions htmlentities() and htmlspecialchars() did not properly
recognize partial multi-byte sequences. Certain sequences of bytes could be
passed through these functions without being correctly HTML-escaped.
Depending on the browser being used, an attacker could use this flaw to
conduct cross-site scripting attacks. (CVE-2007-5898)

A PHP script which used the transparent session ID configuration option, or
which used the output_add_rewrite_var() function, could leak session
identifiers to external web sites. If a page included an HTML form with an
ACTION attribute referencing a non-local URL, the user's session ID would
be included in the form data passed to that URL. (CVE-2007-5899)

It was discovered that the PHP fnmatch() function did not restrict the
length of the string argument. An attacker could use this flaw to crash the
PHP interpreter where a script used fnmatch() on untrusted input data.
(CVE-2007-4782)

It was discovered that PHP did not properly seed its pseudo-random number
generator used by functions such as rand() and mt_rand(), possibly allowing
an attacker to easily predict the generated pseudo-random values.
(CVE-2008-2107, CVE-2008-2108)

As well, these updated packages fix the following bug:

* after 2008-01-01, when using PEAR version 1.3.6 or older, it was not
possible to use the PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) to
upgrade or install packages. In these updated packages, PEAR has been
upgraded to version 1.4.9, which restores support for the current
pear.php.net update server. The following changes were made to the PEAR
packages included in php-pear: Console_Getopt and Archive_Tar are now
included by default, and XML_RPC has been upgraded to version 1.5.0.

All php users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which
contain backported patches to resolve these issues.

Before applying this update, make sure that all previously-released
errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via Red Hat Network. Details on how to use
the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_58_10188

263501 - fix PEAR with current pear.php.net server
285881 - CVE-2007-4782 php crash in glob() and fnmatch() functions
382411 - CVE-2007-5898 php htmlentities/htmlspecialchars multibyte sequences
382431 - CVE-2007-5899 php session ID leakage
445006 - CVE-2008-2051 PHP multibyte shell escape flaw
445684 - CVE-2008-2107 PHP 32 bit weak random seed
445685 - CVE-2008-2108 PHP weak 64 bit random seed

http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2007-4782
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2007-5898
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2007-5899
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2008-2051
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2008-2107
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2008-2108
http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#moderate