Security – Einträge für Dezember 2006

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/.