Deserialization of Untrusted Data Affecting phpunit/phpunit package, versions <8.5.52>=9.0.0, <9.6.33>=10.0.0, <10.5.62>=11.0.0, <11.5.50>=12.0.0, <12.5.8


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.34% (26th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-PHP-PHPUNITPHPUNIT-15123584
  • published28 Jan 2026
  • disclosed27 Jan 2026
  • creditAqhmal Hafizi

Introduced: 27 Jan 2026

CVE-2026-24765  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-502  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade phpunit/phpunit to version 8.5.52, 9.6.33, 10.5.62, 11.5.50, 12.5.8 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Deserialization of Untrusted Data in the cleanupForCoverage() function, during PHPT test execution. An attacker with write access to the local filesystem can execute arbitrary code by placing a malicious serialized object with a __wakeup method into a .coverage file, which is then deserialized without validation when code coverage is enabled.

This can be achieved by directly modifying the .coverage files, or by compromising a dependency that is used by the target project.

Details

Serialization is a process of converting an object into a sequence of bytes which can be persisted to a disk or database or can be sent through streams. The reverse process of creating object from sequence of bytes is called deserialization. Serialization is commonly used for communication (sharing objects between multiple hosts) and persistence (store the object state in a file or a database). It is an integral part of popular protocols like Remote Method Invocation (RMI), Java Management Extension (JMX), Java Messaging System (JMS), Action Message Format (AMF), Java Server Faces (JSF) ViewState, etc.

Deserialization of untrusted data (CWE-502) is when the application deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid, thus allowing the attacker to control the state or the flow of the execution.

CVSS Base Scores

version 4.0
version 3.1