The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.5 and PHP 5.3.15. This release fixes over 30 bugs and includes a fix for a security related overflow issue in the stream implementation. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.5 or PHP 5.3.15.

For source downloads of PHP 5.4.5 and PHP 5.3.15 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes are recorded in the ChangeLog.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.4 and PHP 5.3.14. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.4 or PHP 5.3.14.

The release fixes multiple security issues: A weakness in the DES implementation of crypt and a heap overflow issue in the phar extension

PHP 5.4.4 and PHP 5.3.14 fixes over 30 bugs. Please note that the use of php://fd streams is now restricted to the CLI SAPI

For source downloads of PHP 5.4.4 and PHP 5.3.14 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes are recorded in the ChangeLog.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.3 and PHP 5.3.13. All users are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.3 or PHP 5.3.13

The releases complete a fix for a vulnerability in CGI-based setups (CVE-2012-2311). Note: mod_php and php-fpm are not vulnerable to this attack.

PHP 5.4.3 fixes a buffer overflow vulnerability in the apache_request_headers() (CVE-2012-2329). The PHP 5.3 series is not vulnerable to this issue.

For source downloads of PHP 5.4.3 and PHP 5.3.13 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes are recorded in the ChangeLog.

PHP 5.3.12/5.4.2 do not fix all variations of the CGI issues described in CVE-2012-1823. It has also come to our attention that some sites use an insecure cgiwrapper script to run PHP. These scripts will use $* instead of "$@" to pass parameters to php-cgi which causes a number of issues. Again, people using mod_php or php-fpm are not affected.

One way to address these CGI issues is to reject the request if the query string contains a '-' and no '='. It can be done using Apache's mod_rewrite like this:

    RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^[^=]*$
    RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} %2d|\- [NC]
    RewriteRule .? - [F,L]
    

Note that this will block otherwise safe requests like ?top-40 so if you have query parameters that look like that, adjust your regex accordingly.

Another set of releases are planned for Tuesday, May, 8th. These releases will fix the CGI flaw and another CGI-related issue in apache_request_header (5.4 only).

We apologize for the inconvenience created with these releases and the (lack of) communication around them.

There is a vulnerability in certain CGI-based setups (Apache+mod_php and nginx+php-fpm are not affected) that has gone unnoticed for at least 8 years. Section 7 of the CGI spec states:

Some systems support a method for supplying a [sic] array of strings to the CGI script. This is only used in the case of an `indexed' query. This is identified by a "GET" or "HEAD" HTTP request with a URL search string not containing any unencoded "=" characters.

So, requests that do not have a "=" in the query string are treated differently from those who do in some CGI implementations. For PHP this means that a request containing ?-s may dump the PHP source code for the page, but a request that has ?-s&=1 is fine.

A large number of sites run PHP as either an Apache module through mod_php or using php-fpm under nginx. Neither of these setups are vulnerable to this. Straight shebang-style CGI also does not appear to be vulnerable.

If you are using Apache mod_cgi to run PHP you may be vulnerable. To see if you are, just add ?-s to the end of any of your URLs. If you see your source code, you are vulnerable. If your site renders normally, you are not.

To fix this, update to PHP 5.3.12 or PHP 5.4.2.

We recognize that since CGI is a rather outdated way to run PHP, it may not be feasible to upgrade these sites to a modern version of PHP. An alternative is to configure your web server to not let these types of requests with query strings starting with a "-" and not containing a "=" through. Adding a rule like this should not break any sites. For Apache using mod_rewrite it would look like this:

         RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(%2d|-)[^=]+$ [NC]
         RewriteRule ^(.*) $1? [L]
     

If you are writing your own rule, be sure to take the urlencoded ?%2ds version into account.

Making a bad week worse, we had a bug in our bug system that toggled the private flag of a bug report to public on a comment to the bug report causing this issue to go public before we had time to test solutions to the level we would like. Please report any issues via bugs.php.net.

For source downloads of PHP 5.3.12 and PHP 5.4.2 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. A ChangeLog exists.