Symfony has Unauthenticated PHP Object Deserialization in MonologBridge server:log Listener

Description

Symfony\Bridge\Monolog\Command\ServerLogCommand (the server:log console command) is a development-time helper that opens a TCP listener and displays log records pushed to it by the application's logging pipeline. Two unsafe defaults combine into a remotely reachable PHP object-deserialization sink:

1. The listener binds to 0.0.0.0:9911 by default; it accepts connections on every interface, not only loopback.
2. Each received frame is processed as unserialize(base64_decode($message)) without an allowed_classes allowlist, without authentication, and without any integrity check. The decoded value is then passed to displayLog(..., array $record) which assumes (without validating) that the result is an array.

Any host that can reach TCP port 9911 on a machine running server:log can therefore submit attacker-chosen serialized PHP payloads. The minimum impact is an unauthenticated denial of service (sending a non-array, e.g. serialize(new stdClass()), crashes the listener with a type error). Object injection with magic-method side effects (__wakeup() / __destruct() / etc.) is reachable before the array type-check fires; full remote code execution is environment-dependent and contingent on usable gadget chains in the autoload set of the target process.

Resolution

The server:log command no longer binds to all interfaces by default: the default --host is now 127.0.0.1:9911, requiring explicit opt-in to accept off-host traffic. Message decoding is gated by an unserialize() allowlist restricted to the Symfony\Component\VarDumper\Caster\* and Symfony\Component\VarDumper\Cloner\* classes that legitimately appear inside dumped log records; any other class is rejected and the record discarded.

The patch for this issue is available here for branch 5.4.

Credits

Symfony would like to thank Toàn Thắng and Sam Sanoop for reporting the issue and Nicolas Grekas for fixing it.