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.
https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/php-5.5.0RC2/NEWS