wordpress and float error causes server to exceed resources

[fristopher]

as seen here

​http://www.exploringbinary.com/php-hangs-on-numeric-value-2-2250738585072011e-308/

would work for ​http://domain.com/?orderby=2.2250738585072011e-308

I know this is a php bug, but it happens to wordpress sites, and could be used as a denial of service, if people keep making requests.

​Can't seem to reproduce the bug

here is the error it produces

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /wp-includes/query.php on line 2194

We've been looking into this since last night, thanks.

It would be nice if reports that are vulnerabilities in nature get reported to security@… in the future. Thanks.

If this triggers when we check a value against a white list as part of our input sanitization, this is gonna be no fun to fix.

This has been fixed upstream. There is very little we can do here. Line 2194 is:

	if ( ! in_array($orderby, $allowed_keys) )

If we can't do that, I'm not sure there's much we can do to sanitize this in userland. The fix was one word upstream, but could be a significant amount of code downstream.

Per IRC chat 11/5/2011, closing wontfix. Not under our control. Plan is to contact PHP guys to see if there's anything we should do, contact major hosts to make sure they're aware of it, post on WP blogs to warn users.

Turned the code by AirCraft24.com into a plugin which also handles:

• Different decimal point placement: 222.50738585072011e-310
• Trailing zeroes: 2.22507385850720110e-308
• Capital exponent sign

I just placed this in the wp-content/mu-plugins folder on 6 tests sites and this fixes the problem perfectly.

I tested on CentOS 5.5 with php 5.3.3 and IIS 7 with php 5.3.3. Both were affected prior to using the plugin, both are fine now. I used Wordpress 3.0.4 and 3.1-RC2 for testing.

Thanks for turning the code in a plugin.

Made a request on the Plugin Directory.

The plugin is now ​available in the Plugin Directory.

I've added array handling in the development version. Would appreciate feedback.