OSEC

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From: Matthew Murphy (mattmurphy_at_kc.rr.com)
Date: Sat Jul 20 2002 - 20:45:17 CDT

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    The PHP interpreter is a heavy-duty CGI EXE (or SAPI module, depending on
    configuration) that implements an HTML-embedded script language. A
    vulnerability in PHP can be used to cause a denial of service in some cases.

    PHP's install process on Apache requires a "/php/" alias to be created, as
    it resolves CGI paths to a virtual. (e.g, /php/php.exe not C:\php\php.exe).

    To solve the obvious security vulnerability posed by allowing PHP to run
    from the web, the development team added a cgi.force_redirect option that is
    enabled by default in Apache.

    However, regardless of the force_redirect value, it is still possible to
    load the binary without a script path:

    (e.g, http://localhost/php/php)

    A problem exists in PHP; specifically, it does not terminate when given no
    command-line arguments. A consistent flow of requests like the above will
    exhaust all resources for CGI/ASAPI on the server.

    Exploit: http://www.murphy.101main.net/php-apache.c

    I tried to make sure this would run on Linux/BSD, but no guarantees...
    Compiles cleanly on WinMe with MSVC 6.0.