PHP 5.4.1 in - Suhosin out

Today I finally moved PHP 5.4.1 into our [testing] repository. Our previous tests of 5.4.0 were quite successful. In short PHP 5.4 is ready for production now and will be in our [extra] repository in a couple of days.

When I first packaged PHP 5.4.0 one of the most concerning issues was the lack of a compatible Suhosin patch and extension. Unfortunately this situation has not changed within the last two months: there is still no information if or when Suhosin will be released for recent versions of PHP. Therefor I decided to remove the Suhosin patch and its extension from our repository. To not break compatibility on minor updates the current version in [extra], PHP 5.3.11, includes a patched version of Suhosin; the last official one was dedicated for 5.3.9.

Suhosin is a safe guard for scripts and PHP itself. It consists of patch to PHP and an extension which can be used independently. The patch aims to protect the PHP core against buffer overflows and string format vulnerabilities. Scripts written in PHP are protected by the Suhosin extension. It can be configured to disallow or limit certain user input. There is also a feature to transparently encrypt cookie and session data. More of Suhosin’s features are described on its website.

Certainly some of Suhosin’s features are a good idea as they might protect you in case PHP itself or scripts fail. This is why it was added years ago when I took over maintainership of PHP. Fortunately some of its features got added to PHP itself over time. But today we are confronted with several problems:

There is no Suhosin for PHP 5.4. This means we would be stuck at 5.3 and cannot ship the most recent packages which is one of the goals of Arch Linux.
The upstream project has become less and less active in the past years. There are certain indicators which make Suhosin an unhealthy open source project: There is still only one main contributor, the development process is mostly closed, there is no public repository for the patch, no bug tracker, the forums are in maintenance mode for years and the latest news entry is from 2007. Of course things might be different in the background, but this is the situation which is publicly visible.
The delays between PHP releases and their Suhosin counterparts are increasing. I often have to patch the Suhosin patch itself to use it with latest minor updates of PHP. This leaves us with a PHP version that is neither supported by the PHP project nor the Suhosin authors. While these modifications are mostly trivial I cannot exclude the possibility that I break PHP in a dangerous way. The situation is even worse on major update like we have now. Adjusting Suhosin to PHP 5.4 is not trivial. In addition to this testing development releases or release candidates often means that you have to disable Suhosin.
There are no plans of the project to ever move any of Suhosin’s features into PHP itself. In fact the Suhosin author is strictly against such a move.

In general we have a “Do not patch” policy in Arch and try to keep our packages as close to upstream as possible. In its current state I no longer have any excuse to break this rule for Suhosin; in fact I now have a lot of arguments which support this policy. So even if a new version of Suhosin was released tomorrow, next week or in a few months, it wont be re-added to our PHP packages. The upstream projects would need some changes to its process to be reliable again.The relationship with the PHP project itself has to improve and it should at least be tried to apply certain features into the PHP core project.