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Re: [Full-disclosure] Critical PHP bug - act ASAP if you are running web with sensitive data



Jasper Bryant-Greene wrote:
Moriyoshi Koizumi wrote:
Jasper Bryant-Greene wrote:

I very much doubt there are many applications at all containing code like this. It is illogical to be decoding html entities from user input. Therefore I would not call this a "very serious problem" and certainly not a critical bug.

Not really. While this is not part of the HTML / HTTP standards, major browsers around try to send such characters in the user input as HTML entities that cannot all be represented in the encoding of the originating HTML page, it's quite probable
the function is used to filter the query strings.

Indeed, it probably is, but hopefully the results of that are not then echoed out to the browser without running htmlspecialchars() etc on them... If they are (which is the root of this "security problem") then that is the fault of the idiot who wrote the code, not PHP. You can only protect users from their own stupidity to a certain degree...


OK, ignore that, forgot what we were talking about for a while there :)

htmlspecialchars() should still be run on the output, otherwise you have another security hole, but of course that won't protect against sending memory contents back to the user...

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Jasper Bryant-Greene
General Manager
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