CESA-2005:031: php security update

Description

Updated php packages that fix various security issues are now available for CentOS Linux 2.1.

PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language commonly used with the Apache HTTP Web server. A double-free bug was found in the deserialization code of PHP. PHP applications use the unserialize function on untrusted user data, which could allow a remote attacker to gain access to memory or potentially execute arbitrary code. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CAN-2004-1019 to this issue. Flaws were found in the pack and unpack PHP functions. These functions do not normally pass user supplied data, so they would require a malicious PHP script to be exploited. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CAN-2004-1018 to this issue. A bug was discovered in the initialization of the OpenSSL library, such that the curl extension could not be used to perform HTTP requests over SSL unless the php-imap package was installed. Users of PHP should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain fixes for these issues.