Apache 1.3.27 Released The Apache Software Foundation and The Apache Server Project are pleased to announce the release of version 1.3.27 of the Apache HTTP Server. This Announcement notes the significant changes in 1.3.27 as compared to 1.3.26. This version of Apache is principally a security and bug fix release. A summary of the bug fixes is given at the end of this document. Of particular note is that 1.3.27 addresses and fixes 3 security vulnerabilities. CAN-2002-0839 (cve.mitre.org): A vulnerability exists in all versions of Apache prior to 1.3.27 on platforms using System V shared memory based scoreboards. This vulnerability allows an attacker who can execute under the Apache UID to exploit the Apache shared memory scoreboard format and send a signal to any process as root or cause a local denial of service attack. We thank iDefense for their responsible notification and disclosure of this issue. CAN-2002-0840 (cve.mitre.org): Apache is susceptible to a cross site scripting vulnerability in the default 404 page of any web server hosted on a domain that allows wildcard DNS lookups. We thank Matthew Murphy for the responsible notification and disclosure of this issue. CAN-2002-0843 (cve.mitre.org): There were some possible overflows in ab.c which could be exploited by a malicious server. Note that this vulnerability is not in Apache itself, but rather one of the support programs bundled with Apache. We thank David Wagner for the responsible notification and disclosure of this issue. We consider Apache 1.3.27 to be the best version of Apache 1.3 available and we strongly recommend that users of older versions, especially of the 1.1.x and 1.2.x family, upgrade as soon as possible. No further releases will be made in the 1.2.x family. Apache 1.3.27 is available for download from http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/ Please see the CHANGES_1.3 file in the same directory for a full list of changes. Binary distributions are available from http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/binaries/ The source and binary distributions are also available via any of the mirrors listed at http://www.apache.org/mirrors/ As of Apache 1.3.12 binary distributions contain all standard Apache modules as shared objects (if supported by the platform) and include full source code. Installation is easily done by executing the included install script. See the README.bindist and INSTALL.bindist files for a complete explanation. Please note that the binary distributions are only provided for your convenience and current distributions for specific platforms are not always available. Win32 binary distributions are based on the Microsoft Installer (.MSI) technology. While development continues to make this installation method more robust, questions should be directed to the news:comp.infosystems.www.servers.ms-windows newsgroup. For an overview of new features introduced after 1.2 please see http://httpd.apache.org/docs/new_features_1_3.html In general, Apache 1.3 offers several substantial improvements over version 1.2, including better performance, reliability and a wider range of supported platforms, including Windows NT and 2000 (which fall under the "Win32" label), OS2, Netware, and TPE threaded platforms. Apache is the most popular web server in the known universe; over half of the servers on the Internet are running Apache or one of its variants. IMPORTANT NOTE FOR APACHE USERS: Apache 1.3 was designed for Unix OS variants. While the ports to non-Unix platforms (such as Win32, Netware or OS2) are of an acceptable quality, Apache 1.3 is not optimized for these platforms. Security, stability, or performance issues on these non-Unix ports do not generally apply to the Unix version, due to software's Unix origin. Apache 2.0 has been structured for multiple operating systems from its inception, by introducing the Apache Portability Library and MPM modules. Users on non-Unix platforms are strongly encouraged to move up to Apache 2.0 for better performance, stability and security on their platforms. Apache 1.3.27 Major changes Security vulnerabilities * Fix the security vulnerability noted in CAN-2002-0839 (cve.mitre.org) regarding ownership permissions of System V shared memory based scoreboards. The fix resulted in the new ShmemUIDisUser directive. * Fix the security vulnerability noted in CAN-2002-0840 (cvs.mitre.org) regarding a cross-site scripting vulnerability in the default error page when using wildcard DNS. * Fix the security vulnerability noted in CAN-2002-0843 (cve.mitre.org) regarding some possible overflows in ab.c which could be exploited by a malicious server. New features The main new features in 1.3.27 (compared to 1.3.26) are: * The new ErrorHeader directive has been added. * Configuration file globbing can now use simple pattern matching. * The protocol version (eg: HTTP/1.1) in the request line parsing is now case insensitive. * ap_snprintf() can now distinguish between an output which was truncated, and an output which exactly filled the buffer. * Add ProtocolReqCheck directive, which determines if Apache will check for a valid protocol string in the request (eg: HTTP/1.1) and return HTTP_BAD_REQUEST if not valid. Versions of Apache prior to 1.3.26 would silently ignore bad protocol strings, but 1.3.26 included a more strict check. This makes it runtime configurable. * Added support for Berkeley-DB/4.x to mod_auth_db. * httpd -V will now also print out the compile time defined HARD_SERVER_LIMIT value. New features that relate to specific platforms: * Support Caldera OpenUNIX 8. * Use SysV semaphores by default on OpenBSD. * Implemented file locking in mod_rewrite for the NetWare CLib platform. Bugs fixed The following bugs were found in Apache 1.3.26 (or earlier) and have been fixed in Apache 1.3.27: * mod_proxy fixes: - The cache in mod_proxy was incorrectly updating the Content-Length value from 304 responses when doing validation. - Fix a problem in proxy where headers from other modules were added to the response headers when this was already done in the core already. * In 1.3.26, a null or all blank Content-Length field would be triggered as an error; previous versions would silently ignore this and assume 0. 1.3.27 restores this previous behavior. * Win32: Fix one byte buffer overflow in ap_get_win32_interpreter when a CGI script's #! line does not contain a \r or \n (i.e. a line feed character) in the first 1023 bytes. The overflow is always a '\0' (string termination) character.