Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4: RHSA-2008:0545-01 Moderate: PHP Update

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.