PHP safe_mode bypass

About 3 month ago I came across a bug while playing with PHP commands on command line. I was investigating a php execution vulnerability in one of the Cipher4 CTF services where an attacker could execute PHP commands remotely. To quickly fix the issue and not break the service I was going to turn the safe_mode=on for this particular call. For my testings I used the following options:

-n No php.ini file will be used
-d foo[=bar] Define INI entry foo with value ‘bar’
-r Run PHP without using script tags <?..?>

A local test on my windows box with PHP 4.4.1:

C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\Reiners>php -n -d safe_mode=on -r “exec(‘calc’);”
The command “/calc” is either misspelled or could not be found.

Now the slash infront of the command was really confusing. It looks like all the safe_mode is doing to prevent the command being executed is to add a slash infront of the command. After playing a bit more I found out that this can be circumvented by adding a backslash infront of your command.

C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\Reiners1>php -n -d safe_mode=on -r “exec(‘\calc’);”

Voila, the calculator pops up and we have successfully bypassed the safe_mode. This works with the latest Version of PHP 4 and PHP 5 and of course in webapplications too.

<?php exec('\calc'); ?>

Note, that for some reasons you will not get the error message at the latest versions, but the code is executed anyhow. Furthermore, this only works with the functions exec(), system() and passthru() and only on Windows! I havent stepped through all the PHP source, but it seems to me that this bug has something to do with the path seperator on windows and the call of escapeshellcmd() and can not be used on unix enviroments.
I have reported this issue 3 month ago by several emails and decided to post it at the bugsystem over here 1 month ago after I got no response. Until today, there was no response at the bugsystem too so I’m putting it on my tiny blog. Lets see what happens 😉

As it is well known anyway: don’t trust the PHP safe_mode.

Update:
Finally after about 1 year they patched this bug. Thanks to Stefan Esser!