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Date:  Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:19:45 -0600
From:  Raphael Geissert <atomo64+debian@...il.com>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject:  Re: Re: CVE Request - roundcubemail

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Christian Hoffmann wrote:

> On 2008-12-15 11:32, Florian Weimer wrote:
>> Nowhere in the documentation it says that "" quotes are unsafe when
>> combined with a sufficiently general capture pattern.
> Well yes, it would probably be better to have a big warning at this
> place, because this flag is very dangerous unless used properly and all
> use cases should be expressable through preg_replace_callback as well,
> which is hard to use improperly from a syntax point of view, as no
> evaluation of user-supplied data is ever going to happen. :)
> But I would not say that PHP or its docs are wrong because of this.

IMHO the docs are lacking a very important bit of information. 

> I cannot think of a case where single quotes could be easily
> circumvented somehow, but I'd never claim to be perfectly right here.
> Upstream added a perfectly fine fix, they replaced the /e usage by
> preg_replace_callback, so I don't see a reason why you would want to
> apply a different fix.
> 

Of course, no different fix was planned (on roundcube).
We were actually looking for something in PHP itself that could be treated as
the origin of all those security issues. We have been thinking about disabling
support for the e modifier, but that requires collaboration with upstreams (PHP
and script writers) and looking for incompatibilities in existing software.
Maybe it could be dropped from PHP6, now that register_globals, safe_mode,
magic_quotes_gpc, and friends are being dropped as well.

Cheers,
- -- 
Raphael Geissert - Debian Maintainer
www.debian.org - get.debian.net

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