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05 January 2011, 12:50

Floating point DoS attack

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PHP Logo A bug in the way the PHP scripting language converts certain numbers may cause it to tie up all system resources. For example, on 32-bit systems, converting the string "2.2250738585072011e-308" into a floating point number using the function zend_strtod results in an infinite loop and consequent full utilisation of CPU resources.

PHP 5.2 and 5.3 are affected, but apparently only on Intel CPUs which use x87 instructions to process floating point numbers. The x87 design has long been known to contains a bug which triggers just this problemPDF when computing approximations to 64-bit floating point numbers. By default, 64-bit systems instead use the SSE instruction set extension, under which the error does not occur. Processing the numbers 0.22250738585072011e-307, 22.250738585072011e-309 and 22250738585072011e-324 also triggers an infinite loop.

It may also be possible to remotely disable some server systems merely by sending this value as a parameter in a GET request. The PHP development team has fixed this in the forthcoming version 5.3.5. A patch for version 5.2.16 is available from the repository.

(crve)

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