PHP Floating Point Bug Crashes Servers

angry tapir writes "A newly unearthed bug in certain versions of the PHP scripting language could crash servers when the software is given the task of converting a large floating point number, raising the possibility that the glitch could be exploited by hackers. The bug will cause the PHP processing software to enter an infinite loop when it tries to convert the series of digits "2.2250738585072011e-308" from the string format into the floating point format. The bug only seems to affect version 5.2 and 5.3 of the language." Adds reader alphadogg: "Computer scientist Rick Regan first reported the bug on Monday, and the PHP development team issued patches the following day."

Comments

Why does this code even exist?

[TheRaven64]

Maybe I'm missing something, but why does PHP have its own version of strtod()? It's a standard C99 function, so you'll find it in libc or equivalent in any C99-compliant platform (including Windows) and more effort has probably gone into optimising that version than the PHP version, although if you're converting from strings to floating point values anywhere performance critical then you're probably Doing It Wrong.

Did the Zend team think that there weren't enough security holes in PHP and decide to increase the attack surface?

Very large?

[GrAfFiT]

Am I the only one to notice that 2.2250738585072011e-308 is not very large?
Apparently, some journalists need a patch too.

My 2.2250738585072011e-308 cents.