Yes, but is this the only edge effect of suhosin ?
Olivier

Le 23/05/2011 21:04, azurIt a écrit :
this can be disabled in suhosin:
http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/configuration.html#suhosin.post.disallow_nul



______________________________________________________________
> Od: "Michael M Slusarz" > Komu: imp@lists.horde.org
> Dátum: 23.05.2011 21:00
> Predmet: Re: [imp] BUG: php 5 suhosin triggers MBOX_PREFIX separator
>
Quoting Rick Romero :
> Quoting Michael M Slusarz : > >> Quoting Rick Romero : >> >>> Quoting Michael M Slusarz : >>> >>>> Quoting Olivier : >>>> >>>>>> suhosin[2446]: ALERT - ASCII-NUL chars not allowed within >>>>>> request variables - dropped variable 'view' (attacker >>>>>> 'XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX', file '.../services/ajax.php') >>>> >>>> Still waiting for someone to tell me how a NULL character, by >>>> itself, is a security threat. >>> >>> What if the variable is expected to be numeric and you start doing >>> math on it? >> >> But what if the variable ends up being 0. That's a perfectly valid >> integer, but could cause problems if the application uses it as a >> divisor. >> >>> Isn't the purpose of suhosin to try and catch the stuff developers >>> didn't catch? >> >> But you can't break things that are supposed to work otherwise. >> NULL is a perfectly acceptable input in URL parameters. >> >> And, e.g. with the 0 value above, the interpreter CAN'T possibly >> catch/process all valid inputs. That is the duty of the >> application author. > > I dunno. I agree with your last paragraph, it's not suhosin's job > to be a substitute for proper input validation. But kinda I think > that contradicts 'NULL is a perfectly acceptable input..'. > I mean - Do you really design an application and say "Yep, we're > going to expect a user (or unknown entity) to send a NULL here" ? Why not? That may be YOUR belief, or the way that you would code things, but the fact is *BOTH* PHP and the URL specs allow this to happen. So it is broken behavior to disallow this. Period. In our case, we need a way to indicate a mailbox is not an IMAP mailbox. I chose the method of including a null character in the mailbox string since this is the ONLY character not allowed in IMAP mailboxes (yes, all other control characters are allowed). It works great everywhere - as it should because it doesn't violate any spec or API - except when using suhosin. Suhosin = broken. > Assuming it's coded 'properly' that variable should have been > pre-set in code, and upon receiving a URL param with data outside > the expected range (numerical, >0), promptly ignored it. Or am I > wrong? You would be wrong. Why do you want to ignore proper URL form data? If someone sends you an encoded null character (%00), that's a character within the allowed range so why should it be treated any differently? What if I have a page that sends the first 16 bytes of an image provided to it to the server to do some kind of MIME Magic testing - preventing the need to send the whole file. This binary data may contain nulls. Who are you to tell me that this is a "security" violation? Just because null characters can be used for things such as buffer overruns in certain languages does not mean they are evil. You simply can't remove them from a data stream without knowing the context. I would be very wary of running something that supposedly "increases" security on your machine when the actual theory behind that code is this deeply flawed.
michael
___________________________________ Michael Slusarz [slus...@horde.org]
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