Re: [PHP-INSTALL] "system (" in any textarea hangs php/apache ?

[email protected] (Ryan Schmidt)
Newsgroups php.install
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Aug 15, 2009, at 17:44, Vineet Bansal wrote:

> I have a fresh php 5.2.6 install on Apache 2 under CentOS 5.3.  
> After receiving complaints from some users that they were unable to  
> submit their abstracts on our proposal submission website, I was  
> able to isolate the problem to this minimal and extremely simple  
> example:
>
> <html>
> <head>
> </head>
> <body>
> <form name="submitform" action="phantomurl.php" method="post">
> <textarea name="mytextarea"></textarea>
> <input type="submit" value="Submit"/>
> </form>
> </body>
> </html>
>
> The phantomurl.php doesn't exist because its irrelevant to the  
> example. The above code works fine and leads to a 404 error when  
> anything is entered in the textbox, except when you enter "system("  
> or "system (". In this case, the browser simply chugs along and  
> eventually times out on the request (no matter how high the timeout  
> is set in php.ini). I have confirmed this problem with another  
> server with php 5.1.6 which Centos 5.3 officially supports. If I  
> change phantomurl.php to phantomurl.txt, then again it works  
> (although after a bit of delay) and shows me a 404 again.
>
> Can someone confirm if they're having the same issue? I'm not sure  
> if apache or php is the culprit here, maybe trying to parse the  
> input for security reasons? I initially thought SELinux was causing  
> the issue, but disabling it doesn't solve it either.

I cannot reproduce the issue on my system. I have tested with PHP  
5.3.0 running on Mac OS X 10.4.11 on Intel, both as a module in  
Apache 2.2.11 and as a FastCGI binary in lighttpd 1.4.22.

Do you have a script in your auto_prepend_file ini directive, or a  
global script in your project, which might be processing your $_POST  
array in some way and causing this problem?

Do you have any PHP extensions that are loaded that might be doing  
this? Try disabling them.
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