On Wed, Sep 20, 2006 at 10:09:21AM -0700, Eucke enlightened us:
can you demonstrate working examples of these exploits on a fully updated CentOS machine ?
This is not a vulnerability that I have discovered but one that the nessus security analysis program identified and is documents with the following RHN php security update: RHSA-2005-831. Nessus is recommending moving to 5.0.4. Could this be something that has been fixed already within the 4.3.X php versions within Centos and nessus is misreading this as an issue having not been compiled specifically for Centos but RHES4?
If it is an existing issue I would like to figure out how to address it without issues...if it's not an issue then I intend to just move on. I tried searching the Centos bug tracker but had no luck there.
You have two questions.
First: Nessus reports probably vulnerabilities, often based on version numbers. This is inaccurate on RHEL-based systems. Read http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_backport.html for the reasons why.
Second: RHEL 4, and therefore CentOS 4, will (most likely) never have a version of php newer than 4.3.9-something. The something will change as security issues are fixed and backported (you did read the link above, right?). The idea of RHEL is to provide a stable, fairly static environment, which is patched for security holes and some features.
That said, CentOS provides the opportunity to update some of those features through the CentOS-Plus repository. Read http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/centosplus/Readme.txt for more details.
So, just because nessus says it's broken doesn't mean it is.
Matt