The Zend Engine in PHP before 5.4.16 RC1, and 5.5.0 before RC2, does not properly determine whether a parser error occurred, which allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption and application crash) via a crafted function definition, as demonstrated by an attack within a shared web-hosting environment. NOTE: the vendor's http://php.net/security-note.php page says "for critical security situations you should be using OS-level security by running multiple web servers each as their own user id.
The product receives input or data, but it does not validate or incorrectly validates that the input has the properties that are required to process the data safely and correctly.