Synopsis
The remote Red Hat host is missing one or more security updates.
Description
Updated php packages that fix multiple security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having moderate security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores, which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability from the CVE links in the References section.
PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language commonly used with the Apache HTTP Server.
It was discovered that the PHP XSL extension did not restrict the file writing capability of libxslt. A remote attacker could use this flaw to create or overwrite an arbitrary file that is writable by the user running PHP, if a PHP script processed untrusted eXtensible Style Sheet Language Transformations (XSLT) content. (CVE-2012-0057)
Note: This update disables file writing by default. A new PHP configuration directive, 'xsl.security_prefs', can be used to enable file writing in XSLT.
A flaw was found in the way PHP validated file names in file upload requests. A remote attacker could possibly use this flaw to bypass the sanitization of the uploaded file names, and cause a PHP script to store the uploaded file in an unexpected directory, by using a directory traversal attack. (CVE-2012-1172)
Multiple integer overflow flaws, leading to heap-based buffer overflows, were found in the way the PHP phar extension processed certain fields of tar archive files. A remote attacker could provide a specially crafted tar archive file that, when processed by a PHP application using the phar extension, could cause the application to crash or, potentially, execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running PHP. (CVE-2012-2386)
A format string flaw was found in the way the PHP phar extension processed certain PHAR files. A remote attacker could provide a specially crafted PHAR file, which once processed in a PHP application using the phar extension, could lead to information disclosure and possibly arbitrary code execution via a crafted phar:// URI.
(CVE-2010-2950)
A flaw was found in the DES algorithm implementation in the crypt() password hashing function in PHP. If the password string to be hashed contained certain characters, the remainder of the string was ignored when calculating the hash, significantly reducing the password strength. (CVE-2012-2143)
Note: With this update, passwords are no longer truncated when performing DES hashing. Therefore, new hashes of the affected passwords will not match stored hashes generated using vulnerable PHP versions, and will need to be updated.
It was discovered that the fix for CVE-2012-1823, released via RHSA-2012:0546, did not properly filter all php-cgi command line arguments. A specially crafted request to a PHP script could cause the PHP interpreter to execute the script in a loop, or output usage information that triggers an Internal Server Error. (CVE-2012-2336)
A memory leak flaw was found in the PHP strtotime() function call. A remote attacker could possibly use this flaw to cause excessive memory consumption by triggering many strtotime() function calls.
(CVE-2012-0789)
A NULL pointer dereference flaw was found in the PHP tidy_diagnose() function. A remote attacker could use specially crafted input to crash an application that uses tidy::diagnose. (CVE-2012-0781)
It was found that PHP did not check the zend_strndup() function's return value in certain cases. A remote attacker could possibly use this flaw to crash a PHP application. (CVE-2011-4153)
Upstream acknowledges Rubin Xu and Joseph Bonneau as the original reporters of CVE-2012-2143.
All php users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to resolve these issues. After installing the updated packages, the httpd daemon must be restarted for the update to take effect.
Solution
Update the affected packages.