PHP 5.2.0 and 4.4 allows local users to bypass safe_mode and open_basedir restrictions via a malicious path and a null byte before a ";" in a session_save_path argument, followed by an allowed path, which causes a parsing inconsistency in which PHP validates the allowed path but sets session.save_path to the malicious path.
We do not consider these to be security issues. For more details see http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=169857#c1
and http://www.php.net/security-note.php