Somebody has leaked CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 in PHP before the patch is out.

gossithedog@cyberplace.social

@christopherkunz there’s one on GitHub but it’s not super functional in reality.. plus people largely haven’t found it yet it’d need more work to scale.

mig5@mig5.masto.host

@GossiTheDog I can’t believe so many leave expose_php = On !

benjamin@piaille.fr

@GossiTheDog Someone never heard of defence in depth?

uztq@infosec.exchange

@GossiTheDog Wondering why Colin is having such a strong opinion here. He is quite knowledgeable on good security tradeoffs usually. Purism ?

tjbutt58@infosec.exchange

@GossiTheDog it's like saying
"Why wear a seatbelt, if you have a head on, you'll probably die anyway"
(biting my tongue before I say something rude)

simon_lucy@mastodon.social

@uztq @GossiTheDog

It would be easy to dismiss it as security by obscurity, though it's more than that it's akin to the obfuscation of code.

The difference is that the layout of addresses should be random each time it's launched.

But like anything identify the mapping and it's another exercise in lookups.

lightning@bv.umbrellix.org

@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social freebsd destroyed again #lang_en

hanscees@ieji.de

@GossiTheDog what is #aslr #php

viraptor@cyberplace.social

@GossiTheDog
It's always such a surprise when someone you respect has a dumb take... But then I remember that there are likely so many dumb takes of mine on the internet

david_chisnall@infosec.exchange

@eloy @aetios @GossiTheDog

ASLR adds work factor for attackers but there are a bunch of ways of breaking it. The Blind ROP attacks, for example, are easy to automate. In practice, it's often possible to leak a pointer.

I really hate the naming because there are two different techniques whose names are the wrong way around. Address Space Randomisation (ASR) was first (I think?) shipped in OpenBSD and randomises each mmap call. The layout of the address space is random. Address Space Layout Randomisation came from the Linux PaX project. It gives a deterministic layout but with a random base. This is nice for deployment: ASR suffers from the problem (especially on 32-bit systems) that the random addresses may be sufficiently fragmented that a later memory allocation fails because there isn't a sufficiently large contiguous space, but it works the next program invocation with different layout.

With ASR, leaking one pointer lets you determine the addresses of all other memory locations in the same region (shared library, malloc bucket, whatever). With ASRL, leaking one pointer is sufficient to determine the location of everything. It turns out it's really easy to leak one pointer. This is even worse for KASLR because your adversary (userspace) has a rich API surface that was never designed on the assumption that kernel addresses were secret (because the MMU means that you can't use a kernel address, even if you know one) and you just need one.

The thing that's changed here seems to be LLMs. Now, rather then using exploit toolkits the include automatic mitigation bypass steps, script kiddies are just asking Claude to produce an exploit. And Claude is doing what LLMs normally do: produce output that looks correct according to a statistical distribution of text. When used in an 'agentic' model, it keeps trying to do this until it finds one output that actually works in the specific conditions that the agentic loop is set up to test. It turns out it's not just nature that can build a better idiot, Anthropic is competing hard in this domain.

The other dimension in this spectrum is the cost. ASLR is basically free. The kernel complexity is tiny (I think the FreeBSD patches had under a hundred lines of functionality change, most of the code was the extra controls for turning it on and off - you really want to be able to turn it off in debuggers, for example, so that your program runs are deterministic, and ideally you want to be able to capture the random seed and replay it so that your debugger can see the conditions that your fuzzer triggered). It also doesn't change the programmer's abstract machine significantly, so if you remove it in the future it won't break things.

If it adds any work factor to attackers, you may as well turn it on because it will at least prevent the least competent ones. And it's embarrassing if your system can be compromised without any effort.

ncrazed@fd00.space

@hanscees @GossiTheDog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomization

mrsp@ottawa.place

@GossiTheDog crap

jt_rebelo@ciberlandia.pt

@8tpercent @GossiTheDog does anyone know if Asustor or QNAP login portals use unpatched PHP versions? They seem to only mention PHP installations on the NAS, not the portals themselves (Synology explains that theirs doesn't), and if I'm not wrong, their remote connection capabilities mean someone could access them remotely without the manager/owner knowing at all.

dragon@toast.dragon2611.net

@GossiTheDog Presumably that may get confused by backports, i know some hosting control panel providers have backported to 7.4 for instance.

dragon@toast.dragon2611.net

@GossiTheDog I guess it depends if the backport changes the reported version.

gossithedog@cyberplace.social

There is another PHP potential RCE vulnerability - CVE-2026-115560 - without a patch. Do not panic.

It is a non-default configuration and will not be a widespread issue.

The mitigations in this thread already fix it, if you want to panic.

https://fosstodon.org/@php/117489802289942474

gossithedog@cyberplace.social

PHP Foundation’s budget is about 700k a year. It’s used on something like 40 million websites. Almost no company who uses it contributes anything and many people work on it for free.

The latest trend is cybersecurity and AI vendors have realised they can vampire off its security for publicity (money).

Perhaps the world would be a better place if those orgs who rely on it just contributed sponsorship to the foundation, and vendors didn’t monetise vulnerabilities for themselves.