Adminer 4.8.1, when using Monolog for logging, allows a Denial of Service (memory consumption) via a crafted serialized payload (e.g., using s:1000000000), leading to a PHP Object Injection issue. Remote, unauthenticated attackers can trigger this by sending a malicious serialized object, which forces excessive memory usage, rendering Adminer’s interface unresponsive and causing a server-level DoS. While the server may recover after several minutes, multiple simultaneous requests can cause a complete crash requiring manual intervention.
The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid.
It is often convenient to serialize objects for communication or to save them for later use. However, deserialized data or code can often be modified without using the provided accessor functions if it does not use cryptography to protect itself. Furthermore, any cryptography would still be client-side security – which is a dangerous security assumption. Data that is untrusted can not be trusted to be well-formed. When developers place no restrictions on “gadget chains,” or series of instances and method invocations that can self-execute during the deserialization process (i.e., before the object is returned to the caller), it is sometimes possible for attackers to leverage them to perform unauthorized actions, like generating a shell.