What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2009-4017

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.0 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 12.0% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2009-11-24 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-770

Description

PHP before 5.2.12 and 5.3.x before 5.3.1 does not restrict the number of temporary files created when handling a multipart/form-data POST request, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (resource exhaustion), and makes it easier for remote attackers to exploit local file inclusion vulnerabilities, via multiple requests, related to lack of support for the max_file_uploads directive.

Affected products

• macOS: 10.6.3
• Debian Linux: 4.0, 5.0, 6.0
• PHP: before 5.2.12; 5.3.0, 5.3.0-alpha1, 5.3.0-alpha2, 5.3.0-alpha3, 5.3.0-beta1, 5.3.0-rc1 (+3) — fixed in 5.2.12

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: PHP 5.2.12. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2010//Mar/msg00001.html
• http://marc.info/?l=bugtraq&m=127680701405735&w=2
• http://news.php.net/php.announce/79
• http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2009/Nov/228
• http://secunia.com/advisories/37482
• http://secunia.com/advisories/37821
• http://secunia.com/advisories/40262
• http://secunia.com/advisories/41480
• http://secunia.com/advisories/41490
• http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4077
• http://www.acunetix.com/blog/websecuritynews/php-multipartform-data-denial-of-service/
• http://www.debian.org/security/2009/dsa-1940

Get alerted when CVE-2009-4017 or the next vulnerability affects your stack