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Bug #30489 Includes are not binary safe
Submitted: 2004-10-20 09:50 UTC Modified: 2004-10-20 10:47 UTC
From: guth at fiifo dot u-psud dot fr Assigned:
Status: Not a bug Package: Scripting Engine problem
PHP Version: 5.0.2 OS: Linux
Private report: No CVE-ID: None
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 [2004-10-20 09:50 UTC] guth at fiifo dot u-psud dot fr 
Description:
------------
hello,

includes (include, require, etc.) are not binary safe.
It is very dangerous for beginners, who often use includes with parameters.

In the following example, i kwow that you can test the file name with pathinfo() but the current PHP behaviour is incorrect.

Reproduce code:
---------------
<?php
$file = $_GET['file'];

$path = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/includes/".$file.".class.php";

if(is_file($path)) {
    include $path;
}

?>

Expected result:
----------------
index.php?file=Forum

Should work.




I suppose that the directory backups/Database.xml is protected by a .htaccess and is not accessible with your browser.

index.php?file=../backups/Dabatase.xml%00

Should not work.

Actual result:
--------------
index.php?file=Forum

Should work.


index.php?file=../backups/Dabatase.xml%00

Works !

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 [2004-10-20 09:52 UTC] derick@php.net 
Sorry, but your problem does not imply a bug in PHP itself.  For a
list of more appropriate places to ask for help using PHP, please
visit http://www.php.net/support.php as this bug system is not the
appropriate forum for asking support questions. 

Thank you for your interest in PHP.

This is up to the PHP programmer to take care of. We can not simply strip out \0's as in some encodings (japanese) it's perfectly valid to have that \0 as part of a multi-byte character.
 [2004-10-20 10:47 UTC] guth at fiifo dot u-psud dot fr 
I know it is up to the PHP programmer to take care of.
But you know perfectly well that you can't trust PHP programmers.
Most of them don't know about this sort of security problems and it should be at least documented in the security part of the documentation.

Some providers (ie : free.fr) disallow \0 in includes.

Is it possible to add a configuration directive in the php.ini file to disally null characters ?


Additionaly, I asked for file :
/www/includes/../backups/Database.xml\0.class.php

Not file :
/www/backups/Database.xml


Last thing, I can't test files with pathinfo(), because of this function returns for "test.xml\0" :

array(2) { ["dirname"]=>  string(5) "../.." ["basename"]=>  string(10) "test.xml\0" }

So there is a problem if the files are in the same directory as PHP files...
 
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