php security update

CentOS Errata and Security Advisory CESA-2008:0545

PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language commonly used with the Apache
HTTP Web server.

It was discovered that the PHP escapeshellcmd() function did not properly
escape multi-byte characters which are not valid in the locale used by the
script. This could allow an attacker to bypass quoting restrictions imposed
by escapeshellcmd() and execute arbitrary commands if the PHP script was
using certain locales. Scripts using the default UTF-8 locale are not
affected by this issue. (CVE-2008-2051)

The PHP functions htmlentities() and htmlspecialchars() did not properly
recognize partial multi-byte sequences. Certain sequences of bytes could be
passed through these functions without being correctly HTML-escaped.
Depending on the browser being used, an attacker could use this flaw to
conduct cross-site scripting attacks. (CVE-2007-5898)

A PHP script which used the transparent session ID configuration option, or
which used the output_add_rewrite_var() function, could leak session
identifiers to external web sites. If a page included an HTML form with an
ACTION attribute referencing a non-local URL, the user’s session ID would
be included in the form data passed to that URL. (CVE-2007-5899)

It was discovered that the PHP fnmatch() function did not restrict the
length of the string argument. An attacker could use this flaw to crash the
PHP interpreter where a script used fnmatch() on untrusted input data.
(CVE-2007-4782)

It was discovered that PHP did not properly seed its pseudo-random number
generator used by functions such as rand() and mt_rand(), possibly allowing
an attacker to easily predict the generated pseudo-random values.
(CVE-2008-2107, CVE-2008-2108)

As well, these updated packages fix the following bug:

• after 2008-01-01, when using PEAR version 1.3.6 or older, it was not
  possible to use the PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) to
  upgrade or install packages. In these updated packages, PEAR has been
  upgraded to version 1.4.9, which restores support for the current
  pear.php.net update server. The following changes were made to the PEAR
  packages included in php-pear: Console_Getopt and Archive_Tar are now
  included by default, and XML_RPC has been upgraded to version 1.5.0.

All php users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which
contain backported patches to resolve these issues.

Merged security bulletin from advisories:
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2008-July/077289.html
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2008-July/077293.html
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2008-July/077305.html
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2008-July/077306.html

Affected packages:
php
php-devel
php-domxml
php-gd
php-imap
php-ldap
php-mbstring
php-mysql
php-ncurses
php-odbc
php-pear
php-pgsql
php-snmp
php-xmlrpc

Upstream details at:
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2008:0545