[IT-SecNots] [MediaWiki-announce] MediaWiki and PHP 5.3.5/5.2.17

[Tim Starling <tstarling AT wikimedia.org>]

If you're running MediaWiki on a 32-bit platform, you should upgrade
to PHP 5.3.5, PHP 5.2.17 or a patched version of PHP from a Linux
distribution which includes a fix for CVE-2010-4645. If you run
MediaWiki on a 32-bit platform with an earlier version of PHP, you
will be vulnerable to a denial-of-service vulnerability.

CVE-2010-4645 is a vulnerability which causes the conversion from a
string to a floating-point number to take forever, for certain special
strings. PHP's weak typing means that such conversion can take place
implicitly, for example in code like "$string > 0". I can confirm that
MediaWiki has modules which will convert user input to a
floating-point number. Conversion can be triggered by an attacker with
no special privileges.

PHP release announcement:
http://www.php.net/archive/2011.php#id2011-01-06-1

Updated Ubuntu packages:
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-1042-1

-- Tim Starling

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