Cross-site scripting in PHP - CVE-2009-5016

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Main Vulnerability Database Vulnerabilities #VU110281

Cross-site scripting in PHP - CVE-2009-5016

Published: October 30, 2018 / Updated: June 8, 2025


Vulnerability identifier: #VU110281
CSH Severity: Medium
CVSS v4: []
CVE-ID: CVE-2009-5016
CWE-ID: CWE-79
Exploitation vector: Remote access
Exploit availability: No public exploit available

Vulnerability details

The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to perform cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.

The vulnerability exists due to insufficient sanitization of user-supplied data when processing data passed via a crafted string that uses overlong UTF-8 encoding, a different vulnerability than CVE-2010-3870. A remote attacker can trick the victim to follow a specially crafted link and execute arbitrary HTML and script code in user's browser in context of vulnerable website.

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability may allow a remote attacker to steal potentially sensitive information, change appearance of the web page, perform phishing and drive-by-download attacks.


Affected software

PHP
Gentoo Linux
dev-lang/php

How to mitigate CVE-2009-5016

Install update from vendor's website.

PHP - addressed in versions 4.10, 5.2.2
dev-lang/php - update to 5.3.8

External References

Related Security Bulletins