Apache 1.3.26 Released

The Apache Software Foundation and The Apache Server Project are pleased to announce the release of version 1.3.26 of the Apache HTTP Server. This Announcement notes the significant changes in 1.3.26.

This version of Apache is principally a security and bug fix release. A summary of the bug fixes is given at the end of this document. Of particular note is that 1.3.26 addresses and fixes the issues noted in CAN-2002-0392 (mitre.org) [CERT VU#944335] regarding a vulnerability in the handling of chunked transfer encoding. We would like to thank Mark Litchfield of ngssoftware.com for discovering and reporting the vulnerability.

We consider Apache 1.3.26 to be the best version of Apache 1.3 available and we strongly recommend that users of older versions, especially of the 1.1.x and 1.2.x family, upgrade as soon as possible. No further releases will be made in the 1.2.x family. Users should also consider upgrading to Apache 2.0 as soon as all of the modules they need become available for 2.0.

Apache 1.3.26 is available for download from

   

       http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/

Please see the CHANGES_1.3 file in the same directory for a full list of changes.

Binary distributions are available from


       http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/binaries/

The source and binary distributions are also available via any of the mirrors listed at


       http://www.apache.org/mirrors/

As of Apache 1.3.17, Win32 binary distributions are now based on the Microsoft Installer (.MSI) technology. This change occurred in order to resolve the many problems WinME and Win2K users experienced with the older InstallShield-based installer.exe file. While development continues to make this new installation method more robust, questions should be directed at the news:comp.infosystems.www.servers.ms-windows newsgroup.

As of Apache 1.3.12 binary distributions contain all standard Apache modules as shared objects (if supported by the platform) and include full source code. Installation is easily done by executing the included install script. See the README.bindist and INSTALL.bindist files for a complete explanation. Please note that the binary distributions are only provided for your convenience and current distributions for specific platforms are not always available.

For an overview of new features introduced after 1.2 please see

   
   http://httpd.apache.org/docs/new_features_1_3.html

In general, Apache 1.3 offers several substantial improvements over version 1.2, including better performance, reliability and a wider range of supported platforms, including Windows 95/98 and NT (which fall under the "Win32" label), OS2, Netware, and TPE threaded platforms.

Apache is the most popular web server in the known universe; over half of the servers on the Internet are running Apache or one of its variants.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR WIN32 USERS: Over the years, many users have come to trust Apache as a secure and stable server. It must be realized that the current Win32 code has not yet reached the levels of the Unix version, but is of acceptable quality. Win32 stability or security problems do not reflect on the Unix version.

Apache 1.3.26 Major changes

Security vulnerabilities

The main security vulnerabilities addressed in 1.3.26 are:

Fix the security vulnerability noted in CAN-2002-0392 (mitre.org) regarding the handling of chunked transfer encoding.

New features

The main new features in 1.3.26 (compared to 1.3.24) are:

Add some popular types to the mime types magic file.

New features that relate to specific platforms:

Unix: Added a '-F' flag which causes the supervisor process to no longer fork down and detach and instead stay attached to the tty - thus making live for automatic restart and exit checking code easier.

Bugs fixed

The following bugs were found in Apache 1.3.24 and have been fixed in Apache 1.3.26:

Allow child processes sufficient time for cleanups but making ap_select in reclaim_child_processes more "resistant" to signal interupts.
Fix for a problem in mod_rewrite which would lead to 400 Bad Request responses for rewriting rules which resulted in a local path. Note: This will also reject invalid requests as issued by Netscape-4.x Roaming Profiles (on a DAV-enabled server)
Recognize platform-specific root directories (other than leading slash) in mod_rewrite for filename rewrite rules.
Disallow anything but whitespace on the request line after the HTTP/x.y protocol string to prevent arbitrary user input from ending up in the access_log and error_log. Also control characters are now escaped.
A large number of fixes in mod_proxy including: adding support for dechunking chunked responses, correcting a timeout problem which would force long or slow POST requests to close after 300 seconds, adding "X-Forwarded" headers, dealing correctly with the multiple-cookie header bug, ability to handle unexpected 100-continue responses sent during PUT or POST commands, and a change to tighten up the Server header overwrite bugfix.