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

[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.

[f4grx@chaos.social]

@GossiTheDog but yeah, php is a bad language and we should get rid of it.

[webhat@infosec.exchange]

@GossiTheDog this one?

https://fedi.katze.sh/@elise/117479383739450605

[stuart@social.sydenham.org.uk]

@f4grx @GossiTheDog

That's really Matt Mullenweg's decision. I'm not holding my breath.

[silhouette@dumbfuckingweb.site]

@GossiTheDog ok there is now an ETA of 26-30 Oct depending on version

[gbargoud@masto.nyc]

@GossiTheDog

So what Meta (who famously [edit: used to] use PHP extensively in what used to be their flagship product) spent on the complete failure that was the metaverse (~$60 billion) could have funded them at current levels for close to 100,000 years

[adhdruid@infosec.exchange]

@GossiTheDog This argument has always been dumb as rocks.

Nobody @ me about entropy. This vulnerability, however severe, backed by more computing power than all non-AI technology combined, still hasn’t been exploited in one of the largest attack surfaces in the world, in all but perfect conditions with config parity.

The downsides of ALSR are tiny, and small bus messaging with large addresses spaces on the very, very fast hardware we have these days make it a no brainer to have enabled along with DEP and memory isolation if available to you.

Core pinning and isolation in conjunction with these mean all but the most dedicated attacks fail at the first hurdle. And I haven’t seen a single successful attack on systems with those in place.

They’re nearly impact-free and built in. I’d argue modern hardware should enforce this by default.

People literally balking at defence in depth measures because they can be defeated.