PHP security patch creates critical vulnerability
The PHP Group released PHP 5.3.10 on Thursday in order to address a critical security flaw that can be exploited to execute arbitrary code on servers running an older version of the Web development platform.
The vulnerability is identified as CVE-2012-0830 and was discovered by Stefan Esser, an independent security consultant and creator of the popular Suhosin security extension for PHP.
SecurityFocus classifies the issue as a design error because it was accidentally introduced while fixing a separate denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability in early January. It affects a number of Web development platforms including PHP, ASP.NET, Java and Python and can be exploited in a so-called hash collision attack. The PHP development team addressed CVE-2011-4885 in PHP 5.3.9, which was released on Jan. 10.
