Last week a critical bug was discovered in PHP. Which affects versions 5.3.9 and 5.2.17. The bug could be exploited to run arbitrary code on a remote PHP system. So upgrade your systems. And of course Stefan Esser popped up with some wise words :)… O well i still think the guy does great work.

More info about the issue can be found on packetstorm (CVE-2012-0830)

session adoption & session fixation

The problem exists because the current session module does not validate the session id that comes in from a cookie. This means uninitialized session id’s can be passed by the client. This happens due to the fact that browsers overwrite cookie if multiple cookies are send per request.
Some people would say this is solvable by implementing session_regenerate_id(). But this is not the case.

Because session fixation can be used to take over control of web applications. Validation is required when multiple cookies are send per request. When multiple cookie are send with a request. Browsers send multiple cookies without domain / path information. This way it’s impossible to tell which cookie belongs to which domain.

So how do we fix this?

There is some userland code that does offer the ability to validate session data. But this has not been widely adopted by other developers.

Code that adds the session ID as a validation key:

session_destory();
session_regenerate_id();
$_SESSION['valid_id'] = session_id();

And the code to check if the session was properly initialized:

if ($_SESSION['valid_id'] !== session_id()) {
  die('Invalid use of session ID');
}

Thank god the internal developer know this. And are working to fix this. For the past days there has been an interesting discussion going on on the internals list. About applying a patch that will fix this. The patch will add some new php.ini features and a new method validate_id() for the session save handler. Hopefully this will be available in version 5.4.

To not break BC strict_mode will be disabled by default. But can be enabled by setting the following setting in php.ini. When enabled uninitialized session ID will be discarded.

session.use_strict_mode=0

To prevent a DoS instead of session fixation. An new feature has been added that deletes possible malicious cookies that prevent new session ID.

session.safe_session_cookie=1

You can read more about session fixation and the upcoming patch on the PHP-Wiki

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I decided to give Ubuntu another try. After downloading and burning a fresh image. I did a clean install. And this time the result was a lot better then the first time. Maybe i just had a bad disk.

Unity still caused me issues. Mainly because i am running a dual monitor setup. And i wan to use a TwinView setup. This just does not seem to work at the moment. So i install GNOME Shell. And that seems to work a lot smoother with two screens. Even my sound issues have been resolved magically. Maybe i should stick with Ubuntu a bit longer.

This weekend i decided to finally try to upgrade Ubuntu to the latest version (11.10). And since the upgrade process was not working out for me. I had no other choice but to do a clean install. No problem. It was time for a clean install anyway.

After fighting my way through a pile of bad rewritable DVDs i finally managed to write to disc that didn’t halt in the middle of the install process. And finished the install quite quickly. No problem there.

The Lightgdm greeting instead of the old GDM interface was nice. I logged in. And then it hit me. O shit they hooked Ubuntu up with the Unity interface. The last time i upgraded Ubuntu that was the first thing i disabled. But my second screen wasn’t activated. So i decided to install the Nvidia drivers first. And then did a reboot.

After the system came back up. The desktop environment didn’t load anymore. And if i waited long enough the whole system would crawl to a halt. Damn! At this point i was getting sleepy. And didn’t want to spend the whole night poking around the system trying to fix this. So a bit of Google magic later i found this. Some issues related to the current Nvidia driver. So i upgraded to the 285.05 version

$ sudo bash
$ add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
$ apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
$ reboot

And after a reboot the desktop was fine again. Nice!

World of Warcraft

After that i installed wine and copied back the old files i already had installed previously. But World of Warcraft didn’t want to start anymore. And although i planned not to play for a while. This got me poking around. And of course couldn’t find a solution. So i downloaded a new game client from battle.net. And started a fresh install. But when the launcher came up. It crashed just like before. Tried it a couple more times. When i noticed it was crashing starting the download. SO i started poking around in the download settings. And disabled peer-to peer. And voila! It started working for me again.

Options > Downloader Preferences
(uncheck ¨Enable peer-to-peer Transfer¨)

Lets remove Unity!

Although i kind alike the Unity interface. It wasn’t running smoothly. And i was having some serious CPU load issues. So i decided to remove it once again. This time. It wasn’t as easy though. I followed the steps in this post. Only to come to the realization that its Gnome 3 i´m dealing with and not Gnome2. O well lets give it a try.

So after messing with the themes a bit. I got the normal look back. Now the only thing annoying left is the bottom bar. That has to go. And preferably moved to the second screen. This was surprisingly easy for a change. Start up DConfig Editor from the Applications menu. And navigate to.

org > gnome > gnome-panel > layout > toplevels

(then change)

monitor : 1
orientation : top

And fix the freaking keyboard

Sound still makes a crackling noise!

But at least i have a desktop that looks reasonably the same as my old and trusted Gnome2 one did.

As many know. There has been quite the turmoil in the SSL world lately with some big CA’s (Comodo, StartCom, Diginotar, GlobalSign) getting hacked. And rogue certificates being generated for major domains like microsoft.com, google.com, etc for who knows what type of malicious purpose. The real problem here are the centralized CA’s. For SSL to work you need to explicitly trust the major CA’s. And if one gets hacked. Well.. we know the deal by now. And the funny thing is that Moxie mentions in his talk. The whole CA wasn’t even part of the original SSL protocol. As the creator of SSL said “It’s something we through in at the end”.

But instead of only bashing the CA’s. Moxie comes with a solution to the problem. In the form of a new protocol Convergence, Which exists of a client and a server package. The client right now is a simple Firefox extension. And when installed it disables the current CA system in the browser. And will use one or more of the selected notaries instead. It even works with self signed certificates. And the back-end is a modular one. And the standard CA verification can be swapped with for instance DNSSEC based verification.

There is still a level of trust involved. But you won’t lay all your trust in one specific CA. Convergence uses notaries. Notaries are anonymous nodes that can be picked at will and can be used to verify the requested certificate. And like i said the notaries are anonymous. No more browser leakage at this point. One of th notaries will act as a bounce node to which a SSL connection is made. All other notaries are contacted through this secure connection.

I am probably not the best person to explain this all. So go ahead and listen/watch Moxie’s talk and form your own opinion. But i think everybody should install this Firefox plugin. And forget about the whole CA system. I went ahead and installed a notary node myself. Which can be found here. More information about setting up a notary node yourself can be found here

Intrigued by the fact that my 32-bit Ubuntu installation did not suffer from the same issue. I started to read the PHP5 changelog for Ubuntu.

CFLAGS=”-D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64″ ./configure

But this has a negative side effect. Namely PHP running 50% slower then it should be. And to my surprise Ubuntu applies the CFLAGS above when compiling PHP5 for a 32-bit platform. So that would mean PHP on Ubuntu is always running 50% slower? Well according to this is should be the case.

I downloaded php-5.3.8 from php.net and compiled two versions. One with the CFLAGS set for large files. And one normal without any changes. After that i downloaded the benchmark script from php-benchmark-script.com. And did a couple of runs on each of the two installs. The results are stunning.

PHP-5.3.8 compiled with large file support:

test_math : 4.414 sec.
test_stringmanipulation : 4.968 sec.
test_loops : 3.529 sec.
test_ifelse : 2.344 sec.
————————————–
Total time: : 15.255 sec.

PHP-5.3.8 compiled without large file support:

test_math : 2.274 sec.
test_stringmanipulation : 2.286 sec.
test_loops : 1.619 sec.
test_ifelse : 1.228 sec.
————————————–
Total time: : 7.407 sec.

That’s pretty much a 50% speed decrease. One more thing i tried is adding the ‘AC_SYS_LARGEFILE’ macro to configure.in and rebuild the configure script. But this had no effect at all.

$ cd php-5.3.8
$ vi configure.in (add AC_SYS_LARGEFILE somewhere)
$ export PHP_AUTOCONF=/usr/share/autoconf2.59
$ ./buildconf –force

I then tried two things. First i build without the CFLAGS. But this didn’t seem to do much. Then i used the same configure script with the CFLAGS for large file support. But there was no speed increase measurable.

So why would Ubuntu have made the choice to compile PHP with the large file support on a 32-bit platform? Are there really that much developers that work on large files in web / cli applications written in PHP? Enough to sacrifice a 50% speed decrease?

I don’t really know the answer to that. But i will do my large file processing on 64-bit machines. And will compile PHP from scratch from now on. Until i have upgraded my aging hardware.

Importer found (0) files to import!

Hmmm. That’s not right. So i had a look at the code behind the importer. Which basically is a loop using a DirectoryIterator object. And some var_dump calls revealed the issue. For some reason ->isFile() was returning (false) for regular files. WTF! Let’s test that on the command line.

$ php -r “var_dump(is_file(‘/some/file.ext’));”;
bool(false)

Ok so we have an issue here. How big are these files really. A inspection revealed they are all over 2GB. Maybe some 32 bit issue? As the platform the code is running on is a 32 bit server. So i asked my colleagues, Googled a bit and read through php.net. To find out that there is an issue with PHP and files larger then 2GB.

https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=27792
https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=48886
http://nl.php.net/manual/en/function.filesize.php

Those however all seem related to filesize. The filesize function manual page even has a note about it. Maybe it’s related?

Note: Because PHP’s integer type is signed and many platforms use 32bit integers, filesize() may return unexpected results for files which are larger than 2GB. For files between 2GB and 4GB in size this can usually be overcome by using sprintf(“%u”, filesize($file)).

But i can’t apply that patch on a production server. So i came up with a simple solution for now. I extended the DirectoryIterator class and have overwritten the isFile method. Which works for now (don’t think this will work on windows).

Class MyDirectoryIterator extends DirectoryIterator {
	public function isFile() {
		return (integer) exec("[ -f {$this->getPathname()} ] && echo 1 || echo 0");
	}
}

Convinced it was a 32 bit issue. I came home later that day. And wanted to try it out on my own desktop. That is a 32 bit system and runs Ubuntu 11.04. To my surprise the result was different then i expected.

$ php -r “var_dump(is_file(‘/some/file.ext’));”;
bool(true)

I used the same files as before. And tested some more big files. But the result was the same. Weird. Let’s try some other 32 bit machines.

Ubuntu 11.04: bool(true)

CentOS release 5.6 (Final): bool(false)
Debian 6.0.2 (squeeze): bool(false)

Only my desktop at home seems to have a good result. Ubuntu must have some patch somewhere to fix this issue? To confirm i compiled PHP 5.3.8 from source. And did the same test again on Ubuntu 11.04. And this time it was (false).

$ php -r “var_dump(is_file(‘/some/file.ext’));”;
bool(false)

I am not really in the mood to search the Ubuntu changelog. And for now the work around will do. But i really would like to know what patch is applied to resolve the issue.

[ update ]

While applying the patch for the is_file issue. I was confronted with the fact that way more function calls cause issues. So while waiting for PHP to get patched i had to create some workarounds for the time being.

Getting the filesize:

(integer) exec("stat -c%s {$file->getFilename()}");

Calculate a MD5 checksum:

$md5 = exec("md5sum {$file->getFilename()}");
$expl = explode('\t', $md5);
return (string) $expl[0];

Calculate the CRC32 checksum:

$hash = exec("cksum {$this->path}");
$expl = explode(' ', $hash);
return $expl[0];

Get the modified time:

$stat = explode('.', exec("stat -c%y {$this->path}"));
$timestamp = strtotime($stat[0]);
return $timestamp;

Hopefully that will do for now. On a side note the issue is solvable by setting certain CFLAGS when compiling PHP. I have no idea what the impact of that will be on the PHP binary. But it does seem to solve the issue. Not sure how one would apply that when PHP is installed from the distro’s repository though.

CFLAGS=”-D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64″ ./configure

uncaught exception: Syntax error, unrecognized expression: .

And the markup that triggered the error was

Nothing wrong there right? And it actually took my quite some time to figure this one out. It would be nice to have a tool that can tell you there are multiple click events assigned to a element? But for now it was just some manual searching and testing.

The issue was caused by an other snippet of Javascript code inside another .js file. This piece of code attached a click event to every div inside a grid td. Which may be a bit to greedy.

$('.admin .gridbg tr td span').click(function() {

And my link was in a nested td inside the grid. And also contained a span tag. So it was actually firing off two click events. From which one failed. Fixing it after that was easy. Either make the first click binding less greedy. Or change the markup of my second grid. I choose the last one.

So the code i was working on. Did something like this.

$date = date('D M d H:i:s Y', strtotime($someVar));

My thought was that by setting the correct locale the dates would appear in the correct language. Wrong!

date_default_timezone_set('Europe/Amsterdam');
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'nl_NL.utf8');

After a reload i was greeted by the same dates as before. In plain English. Oke no worries. Let’s see what setlocale returns.

var_dump(setlocale(LC_ALL, 'nl_NL.utf8'));

bool(false)

That’s not good. Seems like we are missing some locales on the server. Let’s check.

locale -a

en_AG
en_AG.utf8
en_AU.utf8
en_BW.utf8
en_CA.utf8
en_DK.utf8
en_GB.utf8
en_HK.utf8
en_IE.utf8
en_IN
en_IN.utf8
en_NG
en_NG.utf8
en_NZ.utf8
en_PH.utf8
en_SG.utf8
en_US.utf8
en_ZA.utf8
en_ZW.utf8
…

And some more output after that. But not the one i am looking for. But thankfully aptitude was kind enough to provide the missing language packages.

nl_NL
nl_NL@euro
nl_NL.iso88591
nl_NL.iso885915@euro
nl_NL.utf8

So let’s set the correct locale for this script.

setlocale(LC_ALL, 'nl_NL.utf8');

But still no changes. I must be missing something….. Let’s consult the manual. The last line in the examples section is what i was looking for

To format dates in other languages, you should use the setlocale() and strftime() functions instead of date().

Duuh! Completely forgot about strftime. Let’s change the code.

strftime('%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y', strtotime($somevar));

ma aug 15 14:55:06 2011

Perfect. That did it.