After what seems like forever, I guess the number 13 living up to its name, PHP 5.1.3 is finally out of the door. As always when we have a slow release the number of changes is quite impressive, this time being no different. This release includes over 120 bug fixes, addresses a whole bunch of security issues and even includes a few new features, what more could you ask for ;-). To download the release go here: http://www.php.net/downloads.php and the highlights of the release can be found here: http://www.php.net/release_5_1_3.php If you want the full, unfiltered list of change it is also available and can be found here: http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-5.php#5.1.3

The slides from PHP|Tek are now up. The Security Tutorial slides can be found here and the PDO Introduction slides can be found here, to all attending thank you for listening and hopefully at-least a bit of the content was interesting and useful ;-)

Finally got a few moments to recap the PHP Quebec 2006 Conference, which as usual, was a great success and a great deal of fun. I’d like to thank the organizers for doing an amazing job and bringing a great group of people together from both the development and user communities. My talks during the conference went quite well, and I am especially happy with the PDO talk, this topic seemed of particular interest to the audience and I hope we’d get a couple of new PDO users out of it ;-) The slides from my talks are now available online and can be found here: PHP Security: PowerPoint || PDF Introduction to PDO: PowerPoint || PDF

Chris Schifflet has transferred me the reigns of the PHP|Architect's Security Corner; hopefully I will be able to keep up with the tradition of interesting and informative articles on the topic of PHP Security. The first issue was released on March 20ths and takes you on a road of discovery about Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF). My approach was to identify the various means of exploitation possible via CSRF and the possible dangers it presents. By taking this approach not only can the uniqueness of the attack's approach can be demonstrated, but the hacking methodologies used by malicious users can seen as well. In my mind, understanding of the problem is half the solution, of course the other half involving prevention techniques design to avert CSRF are covered as well. If you are interested in learning more about CSRF you may want to grab an issue of the magazine.

While talking with PHP developers this morning I thought of another way unverified serialized strings could be abused. This exploit can only affect PHP 5 installs though, but given the growing market share of PHP 5 it is certainly something worth noting. As you may know classes in PHP are allowed to implement a magic method called __wakeup() that contains operation that are to be performed when a class is deserialized. Some native classes like PDO implement this function with a goal of preventing database serialization and throw an error when it is used. Herein lies the abuse, the attack simply needs to specify a short serialized string that looks like a serialized version of a supposed PDO object. [code] O:3:"PDO":0:{} [/code] When PHP tries to unserialize it, it determines that PDO class has a __wakeup() method and promptly calls it. However, since the method is disallowed, it triggers an exception which, if left uncaught terminates the script with a fatal error. Since most people do not expect unseri...