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Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by larsnystrom on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @08:18AM (#41510638)
The fact they're using `eval()` to execute variable assignment... They could've just used the WTF-feature in PHP with double dollar signs. $$var = $itm; would've been equivalent to their eval statement, but with less code and no RCE.
Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by hypeatei on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @08:29AM (#41510710)
The fact PHP is used for any critical web infrastructure is concerning. I used PHP professionally years ago and don't think it's that awful but certainly not something I'd consider for important systems.
Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by XCSme on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @09:45AM (#41511328)
Wouldn't "eval" in any language result in RCE? Isn't that the point of eval, to execute the given string command?
Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by account42 on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @10:20AM (#41511642)
Fully compiled languages don't even have an eval at all.
Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by sebstefan on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @10:42AM (#41511828)
Not with that attitude

Start shipping the compiler with your code for infrastructure-agnostic RCEs

Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by adolph on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @12:09PM (#41512727)
When you turn pro you call it security software and add it to the kernel.
Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by lambda on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @10:52AM (#41511934)
No, but they have system or the like, which is effectively the same, just being evaluated by the shell. https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/system.3.html
Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by mdaniel on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @12:18PM (#41512806)
And thanks to the magic of "shoving strings from the Internet into a command line", poof, RCE! It bit GitLab twice
Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by xrisk on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @02:06PM (#41513798)
What incident are you referring to?
Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by mdaniel on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @06:39PM (#41515913)
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/327121 is the first one, and I'm having trouble locating up the second (possibly due to the search pollution from the first one) but there are a bunch of "Exiftool has been updated to version [0-9.]+ in order to mitigate security issues" style lines in their security releases feed so it's possible they were bitten by upstream Exiftool CVEs

Anyway, turns out that shelling out to an external binary fed with bytes from the Internet is good fun

Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by account42 on Thursday September 12, 2024 @04:05AM (#41518592)
a) system doesn't let you modify the state of the running process so it doesn't attract abuse like the example here. It's still a bad function but calling it effectively the same is absurd - the scope for "clever" usage of it is much much lower.

b) It's a legacy misfeature that I hope new compiled languages don't copy. There are much much better better interfaces for running processes that don't rely on an intermediate shell.

c) Shell escaping is much more stable than some hipster language like PHP where you'd need to update your escaping for new language changes all the time.

Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by cryptonector on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @01:54PM (#41513709)
You can build an eval for a compiled language, absolutely. You can embed an interpreter, for example, or build one using closures. There's entire books on this, like LiSP in Small Pieces.
Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by dpcx on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @08:36AM (#41510763)
I'm curious about some specifics of why you wouldn't use PHP for _critical_ web infrastructure?
Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by sebstefan on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @08:45AM (#41510814)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hash+site:reddit.com/r/lolphp

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=crypt+site:reddit.com/r/lolphp

>crc32($str) and hash("crc32",$str) use different algorithms ..

>Password_verify() always returns true with some hash

>md5('240610708') == md5('QNKCDZO')

>crypt() on failure: return <13 characters of garbage

> strcmp() will return 0 on error, can be used to bypass authentication

> crc32 produces a negative signed int on 32bit machines but positive on 64bit mahines

>5.3.7 Fails unit test, released anyway

The takeaway from these titles is not the problems themselves but the pattern of failure and the issue of trusting the tool itself. Other than that if you've used php enough yourself you will absolutely find frustration in the standard library

If you're looking for something more exhaustive there's the certified hood classic "PHP: A fractal of bad design" article as well that goes through ~~300+~~ 269 problems the language had and/or still has.

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

Though most of it has been fixed since 2012, there's only so much you can do before the good programmers in your community (and job market) just leave the language. What's left is what's left.

Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by rty32 on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @09:47AM (#41511340)
People keep saying "oh it's php 5.3 and before that are bad, things are much better now", but ...
Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by KMnO4 on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @08:44AM (#41510810)
Any language can be insecure. There’s nothing inherently bad about PHP, other than it’s the lowest-hanging fruit of CGI languages and has some less-than-ideal design decisions.
Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by sebstefan on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @09:29AM (#41511171)
Don't just swipe the "less-than-ideal design decisions" under the rug
Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by bell-cot on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @08:39AM (#41510778)
Modern PHP is about as solid as comparable languages. It's two biggest problems are:

Lingering bad reputation, from the bad old days

Minimal barrier to entry - which both makes it a go-to for people who should not be writing production code in any language, and encourages many higher-skill folks to look down on it

Re:We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the a... by krageon on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @09:30AM (#41511179)
It's very easy to make PHP safe, certainly now that we've passed the 7 mark and we have internal ASTs. Even when using eval, it's beyond trivial to not make gross mistakes.