In this recent post to his blog Padraic Brady looks at the Zend Framework security releases that were made the other day - versions 1.9.7, 1.8.5 and 1.7.9 - to correct a number of security issues in each release. For those that are curious, you can find the full list of fixes here.

While an ongoing process, the initial [security] review focused on specific areas most likely to deal directly or indirectly with user input and the output of user sourced data. [...] The review also included an examination of all new components due to enter service with Zend Framework 1.10. This yielded a number of issues whose fixes will preempt their release into a stable version, and have been reported to the relevant lead developers.

Padraic mentions some of the things that were found and corrected in these security releases including the enforcement of a default character set throughout the framework (with new functions to help with keeping your data consistent) and several potential XSS vulnerabilities in components like the Zend_Json, Zend_Dojo_View_Helper_Editor and Zend_Filter_StripTags.