It looks like Thursday by my calendar.

It looks like Thursday by my calendar. That means we’re taking a swing through the security issues that cropped up in the various major distributions during the past week.

RedHat

Problem: PHP Vulnerability

Description: PHP is an HTML-embeddable scripting language. A number of flaws have been
found in the way PHP handles multipart/form-data POST requests. Each of
these flaws could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the remote
system.

PHP 3.10-3.18 contains a broken boundary check (hard to exploit) and an
arbitrary heap overflow (easy to exploit). These versions of PHP were
shipped with Red Hat Linux 6.2.

PHP 4.0.1-4.0.3pl1 contains a broken boundary check (hard to exploit) and a
heap-off-by-one (easy to exploit). These versions of PHP were shipped with
Red Hat Linux 7.0.

PHP 4.0.2-4.0.5 contains two broken boundary checks (one very easy and one
hard to exploit). These versions of PHP were shipped with Red Hat Linux
7.1 and as erratas to 7.0.

PHP 4.0.6-4.0.7RC2 contains a broken boundary check (very easy to exploit).
These versions of PHP were shipped with Red Hat Linux 7.2

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project  cve.mitre.org) has
assigned the name CAN-2002-0081 to this issue.

If you are running PHP 4.0.3 or above, one way to work around these bugs is
to disable the fileupload support within your php.ini file (by setting
file_uploads = Off).

All users of PHP are advised to immediately upgrade to these errata
packages which close these vulnerabilities.

A previous version of this erratum included a version of the MySQL
extension which was compiled with an incorrect default pathname for the
socket used to connect to database servers residing on the local host.

This setting corresponds to the mysql.default_socket setting in the
/etc/php.ini file, and can also be corrected there.

Soution: Run up2date to update security, or download and install the following packages:

ftp://updates.redhat.com/7.2/en/os/i386/php-4.0.6-15.i386.rpm
ftp://updates.redhat.com/7.2/en/os/i386/php-devel-4.0.6-15.i386.rpm
ftp://updates.redhat.com/7.2/en/os/i386/php-imap-4.0.6-15.i386.rpm
ftp://updates.redhat.com/7.2/en/os/i386/php-ldap-4.0.6-15.i386.rpm
ftp://updates.redhat.com/7.2/en/os/i386/php-manual-4.0.6-15.i386.rpm
ftp://updates.redhat.com/7.2/en/os/i386/php-mysql-4.0.6-15.i386.rpm
ftp://updates.redhat.com/7.2/en/os/i386/php-odbc-4.0.6-15.i386.rpm
ftp://updates.redhat.com/7.2/en/os/i386/php-pgsql-4.0.6-15.i386.rpm

Mandrake

No new unresolved issues.

Suse

No new unresolved issues.

Slackware

No new unresolved issues.

Debian

No new unresolved issues.

It looks like a pretty good week from a Linux security perspective. RedHat was a bit slow to address the PHP vulnerability discovered a few weeks ago. The others have been right on top of the issues. That should make everyone feel a bit more secure.

Tony
Steidler-Dennison