Serendipity 1.3 released (addresses security)

Serendipity 1.3 has finally been released. The new release is mainly a feature consolidation release, but also contains XSS security fixes:

  • The karma rating plugin has been upgraded to support nice, CSS-based rating graphics (see this post) and an overall rehaul on the its coding.
  • Make the Spartacus plugin be able to use FTP upload, a workaround for SafeMode PHP restrictions. Also add a remote backend for plugin update checks.
  • An importer for phpNuke and lifetype has been added.
  • Support for pingbacks has been improved a lot. Trackbacks can now be blocked based on Sender IP checks.
  • Add better CSS styling for some internal plugins and the embedding of images. Also made the Remote-RSS plugin to be capable of Smarty-Templating.
  • Increased Smarty templating features for the {serendipity_fetchPrintEntries} function, to be able to check for entry properties.
  • Add support for SQRelay.
  • Minor CSS and graphic updates to the Bulletproof template.

The full list of 41 changes to this release are documented within the NEWS file.

Regarding Security, the bundled Smarty library has been updated to version 2.6.19 and adresses an issue in environments where the PHP security mode is required. Also, the new Serendipity release contains tighter backend XSS checks so that environments with untrusted authors can be more secure - many thanks to Hanno Böck for addressing this. Most importantly, an issue with XSS attacks within received trackbacks has been discovered by Peter Hüwe and was fixed.

The update is easy as usual, and recommended for Serendipity users - especially if you do not regularly moderate or check your incoming trackbacks.

Upgrade pointers can be found in the FAQ and is as easy as just to upload the new files.

Have fun!