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CVE-2026-41570GHSA-QRR6-MG7R-M243

PHPUnit: Argument injection via newline in PHP INI values forwarded to child processes

Published
Last modified
published
Not listed in CISA KEV
Fix
Fixed in 12.5.22, 13.1.6
None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
  • Exploitation: poc
  • Automatable: no
  • Technical impact: total

Summary

PHPUnit is a testing framework for PHP. In versions 12.5.21 and 13.1.5, PHPUnit forwards PHP INI settings to child processes (used for isolated/PHPT test execution) as -d name=value command-line arguments without neutralizing INI metacharacters. Because PHP's INI parser interprets " as a string delimiter, ; as the start of a comment, and most importantly a newline as a directive separator, a value containing a newline is parsed by the child process as multiple INI directives. An attacker able to influence a single INI value can therefore inject arbitrary additional directives into the child's configuration, including auto_prepend_file, extension, disable_functions, open_basedir, and others. Setting auto_prepend_file to an attacker-controlled path yields remote code execution in the child process. This issue has been patched in versions 12.5.22 and 13.1.6.

Timeline

  1. CVE published
  2. CISA SSVC assessment

    Exploitation: poc · Automatable: no · Technical impact: total

  3. Record last updated

Affected versions

  • sebastianbergmann phpunit

    12.5.21, 13.1.5

  • phpunit/phpunitPackagist

    From 12.5.21 · fixed in 12.5.22

  • phpunit/phpunitPackagist

    From 13.1.5 · fixed in 13.1.6

References 2

GitHub · sebastianbergmann/phpunit