Security

Thanks to Erich Schubert, we were made aware of a bug and security issue in the Plugin Extended properties for entries. Since this plugin is delivered with the core release, we have created a new Serendipity release for both the current stable 1.1 version tree, as well as a new 1.2 beta version.

Serendipity Users that are using the mentioned plugin do not need to upgrade the full release, they can just fetch the updated version of the plugin through this direct link. Put that updated file into your plugins/ serendipity_event_entryproperties/ serendipity_event_entryproperties.php file.

The actual bug was, that people were able to deliver custom entryproperties settings to the Serendipity Frontend via a HTTP-Request, which made them able to bypass a possibly used passwort protection. Any other restriction of viewability of entries done via category read-privileges were not affected, though.

Bottom line is: If you are using password protection for entries, this security update is mandatory for you. Also if you were generally using the entryproperties plugin (which is not installed by default in Serendipity), you are urged to update your plugin. Only people not using this plugin need not care about this issue.

You can download the new full releases as always on the Serendipity download page.

Serendipity 1.1.3 and 1.2-beta2 have been released due to a SQL injection attack reported by Dr. Neal Krawetz today. It is possible to abuse a 'commentMode' variable to inject SQL code that was targeted to the function that fetches comment information. This variable was introduced to Serendipity 1.1 - all prior versions are not affected.

Please update your blogs as soon as possible. If you are using a database backend that allows SQL union queries, the injection could probably lead to disclosure of the stored MD5 password hashes. Because of this, we also suggest to update your blog user account passwords.

It is a good idea to check your server's Access-Logs and search for the 'commentMode' variable to see, if malicious request have been issued to your blog already.

For those people that do not want to upgrade to a whole new version, you can also simply patch the file include/functions_comments.inc.php and replace the single occurence of:

$type = $serendipity['GET']['commentMode'];

to

$type = serendipity_db_escape_string($serendipity['GET']['commentMode']);

We are very sorry for this, but happy to provide a quick fix in short time. You can download the latest files as usual on www.s9y.org. Read the FAQ on how to perform an easy update.

This evening we were notified by fellow co-developer Sebastian Nohn about a full-disclosure posting about a Serendipity SQL injection matter. We have investigated this reported 0day issue, and can tell you that it is not a SQL injection,but instead "only"an SQL error display.

No SQL can be injected using the described method. Because of an invalid category ID, serendipity tries to show entries for that category, but the resulting SQL string contains an emtpy "(())" statement which makes the MySQL parser fail, and report the error on-screen. The SQL queries that Serendipity uses are not secret, and could be looked up in the sourcecode as well.

Even though we consider this issue to be fairly low-impact, Serendipity 1.1.2 has been released because of this, mainly to assure the public that we have addressed the issue. It is not critical that you upgrade to that release. If you do, it is sufficient to update the include/functions_entries.inc.php file. The only change made to that function is documented here

We would also like to express, that we kindly appreciate all bug and security reports about Serendipity, and take them and our responsibility very seriously. Also rest assured that if you contact us developer first before publishing security advisories, we always cooperate, pay credit and fix issues immediately, as we have done in the past. So we look forward to working together with SaMuschie in the future, who seems to taking some serious work in checking security issues - good work on that! :-)

The latest release can be downloaded here. This fix has also been committed to the daily snapshots.

The Serendipity Team is proud to release the Serendipity Weblog version 1.1 to the public.

This new version is aimed for feature enhancement and stability consolidation. The most important change is the overhaul of the media database, which vastly enhances the already obvious superiority of Serendipity's Media management. In depth this means that you can now store and customize meta properties easily - store descriptions, EXIF-Tags and keywords which you can later see and search in your database. You can also now assign detailed privileges for each directory of the media database, and the output is now completely templated. Yes, that means you can customize and style your very own media database, both effective in the backend and the frontend.

The other important change is more granular plugin permission management. You can enable/disable certain markup-plugins on a per-entry basis, and allow/forbid specific usergroups to access certain plugins.

Another visual apparent change is the overhaul of the plugin manager. You can now drag'n'drop order and move your plugins around. Together with the ability of templates to specific the amount and names of sidebars, you have virtually unlimited flexibility for plugin management!

Templating has also intensively been upgraded in the respect of themes being able to specify custom "options". A theme could allow you to choose navigation links, colorsets and much more. Explore the possibilites! Many themes by Carl Galloway and other great designers from our forums have already used that feature to provide you with many cool options!

For the developers among us, it might be of interest to note that Serendipity now also supports easy custom template-engine support. Tired of Smarty? You can also use a plain old PHP template emulation or even a XSLT-transformation layer (read more on this topic here).

Of course we have not only focussed on injecting features, but also fixed some minor bugs, a huge-impact central SQL query optimization and glitches and smaller improvements. In total we have 29 feature improvements, 24 bugfixes and 21 usability/technical improvements. For intense reports on this either read our NEWS-file or past 1.1-beta announcements here and there.

Upgrading is easy as always: Download, unpack, go to your Admin panel, done. Read more here: Serendipity FAQ. The download is available here: Serendipity Download Page.

We hope you'll have fun with this new release and continue to make Serendipity an ever-improving system. Let's have a great 2007!

This new Serendipity release addresses a local file inclusion security issue discovered yesterday. It was possible to give a special parameter to a serendipity file to include a file on your own web-tree (or other files the webserver has read access to). If used on clear-text files, this could be used to disclose information like the apache logfiles on your website.

This error can only happen in a scenario with two prerequisites: Register_Globals needs to be turned on in your PHP configuration AND your webserver must ignore the default Serendipity .htaccess file. This .htaccess file usually prevents to directly call Serendipity's include files via HTTP. Thus we feel that only a very low percentage of installations should be affected by this bug.

However, Serendipity 1.0.4 is a recommended upgrade for everyone taking security responsibly, like we do. We are thankful to the community for inspecting Serendipity, searching for bugs and security issues and reporting them to us. In this case, many thanks to Majestic from the forums for notifying us.

Most of the plugins (both bundled and available via spartacus) were upgraded to also circumvent that bug, so you should upgrade all of your active plugins to the recent versions as well.

The Serendipity 1.1 release tree was also modified with a patch for this issue. It will be contained in todays snapshot, and the 1.1-beta6 release file. The easy steps to perform an upgrade are documented in our FAQ on http://www.s9y.org/.

Serendipity 1.0.x an PHP 5.2.0 currently do not go well together because of the new PHP ext/filter extension. In the early PHP 5.2.0 cycles this provided a function 'input_name_to_filter' which was later dropped, but not removed from Serendipity 1.0

Serendipity 1.1 beta versions already use a function_exists() check to prevent this, but it had not made it into the 1.0 release cycle.

Thus, to make s9y work with PHP 5.2.0, you have three options:

1. Disable the ext/filter extension in your php.ini configuration,
2. Upgrade to Serendipity 1.1-beta versions or
3. edit your serendipity include/compat.inc.php file and replace the string "extension_loaded('filter')" with "extension_loaded('xfilter')", which will effectively disable the follow-up code to take effect

The upcoming Serendipity 1.1 final version will of course integrate a more thorough fix. The serendipity Team is sorry for this confusion it may cause for PHP 5.2.0 users.