A security issue affects the following Ubuntu releases:
Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog)
The following packages are affected:
libapache2-mod-php4 php4-cgi php4-curl
The problem can be corrected by upgrading the affected package to version 4:4.3.8-3ubuntu7.4. In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect the necessary changes.
Details follow:
Ubuntu Security Notice USN-66-1 described a circumvention of the "open_basedir" restriction by using the cURL module. Adam Conrad discovered that the fix from USN-66-1 still allowed to bypass this restriction with certain variants of path specifications.
In addition this update fixes the crash of the PHP interpreter if curl_init() was called without parameters.
For reference, this is the relevant part of the original advisory:
FraMe from kernelpanik.org reported that the cURL module does not respect open_basedir restrictions. As a result, scripts which used cURL to open files with an user-specified path could read arbitrary local files outside of the open_basedir directory.