It's not always HTTP/2. But it's a pretty safe bet.

Why does it say the “vendor” for this is GitHub (for mod_h2)?

Is that just crappy LLM generated copy that is assuming that GitHub the company is responsible for that module because it’s hosted there?

Yes, this is slop, extruded from reading the patch and the official announcement, which is at https://httpd.apache.org/security/vulnerabilities_24.html#CV...

The writing really feels like it was written by a 4GB gemini model running on a phone.

Even having "Which actions should security teams take?" is so incredibly stupid imo. If there is a vulnerability and new version is patched, and I am a security team member reading this, then..

This is Wiz.

Of course that is crappy LLM generated copy.

Since when "memory corruption" = "RCE"?

If you can corrupt memory in a controllable way, you can get a computer to do just about anything that process has rights to. Possibly even the kernel, if you can get at some shared memory.

But it's not a given that memory corruption is exploitable. I thought to call something an RCE you need a working exploit?

Isn't resource consumption a DoS?

A denial of service is a different class of vulnerability (a minor one, generally).

Presumably one of Anthropic, Google, or Apache possesses a working exploit, because the official Apache Foundation report on this CVE claims RCE is possible.

I was prepared to disagree with you, but I agree: I'd say there's a strong norm of not calling things RCE unless you can actually demonstrate RCE, or at least have a clean pathway to demonstrating it (e.g. a full write-what-where).

It's perfectly sufficient to have a CVE for just memory corruption, so the "RCE" framing here feels overstated. Particularly when an LLM should easily prove RCE out if it is in fact present.

Another comment says it has a CVSS score of 9.8 which means CVE, easy to exploit, and an exploit gives LOTS of access.

Before we get too whiny about "it's only memory corruption without any RCE PoC", let's wait until the CVE is unembargoed.

[delayed]

I don't know the backstory here, but there's a long and colorful history of vendors and other parties guessing that some contrived memory corruption bug isn't exploitable and then being proven wrong, so the industry now more or less defaults to the assumption that it's exploitable.

Let me remind you that in response to the PHP bug, one of the front-page HN posts was a guy saying it's probably not exploitable and another offering Bitcoin to anyone who pops their server... with predictable results.

People can be pretty creative with exploitation primitives, and LLMs now replicate that at a scale. And yep, if you found a use-after-free that can be triggered remotely in PHP under some reasonable assumptions, you should probably treat it as a security bug.

> What is CVE-2026-111497?

> CVE-2026-119618 is a critical, high-severity vulnerability involving....

two CVEs? (111497 != 11968)

I saw that too. CVE-2026-111497 is the Brotli CVE, so my guess is they reused that prior page as a base to start with and missed changing that.

You'd think they'd have an LLM reviewing this by now. On the up side, it is refreshing to see good ol' human error still around on the surface!

What makes you think it's not already an LLM error?

Even a tiny model would pick up an error like this during review.

just had claude today spew some basic firewall rules for port 5900 and 5901... it used 5900 and 59001

Even a tiny model might, if promoted correctly.

Even the latest and greatest big models miss trivial errors when simply asked to review a chunk of text.

If you use modern LLMs a lot you'll know they are much better at catching these kind of copy and paste errors than humans are.

Another critical bug discovered by AI.

I want the rabidly AI-hating projects to stand their ground and refuse to fix vulnerabilities discovered with AI assistance.

[delayed]

[delayed]

because it's just some slop generated by a bunch of stochastic parrots and can't be taken seriously :-)

Depending on the context and content, I tend to be against AI pull requests that haven’t been edited by a human.

AI finding vulns? I don’t see how it’s different from valgrind, static analysis, afl, or other fuzzer. I don’t think getting fresh, high-signal analysis is what AI-hating projects are concerned with.

cough Zig... cough

> No LLMs for finding bugs.

> Depending on the context and content, I tend to be against AI pull requests that haven’t been edited by a human.

I've seen on a few open source projects I follow the 100% AI patch with notes to the effect of "I haven't compiled let alone tested these changes but AI said it's fine and my cursory glance agrees".

Like come on - I'm not going to judge using AI to make a useful change, but at least put in more than zero effort.

Depends on exactly what it is that a project is objecting to. For example, here's Nura:

> AI tools have several ethical issues. They require an unreasonable amount of energy[1] and water[2] to build and operate, their models are built in part with heavily exploited workers in unacceptable working conditions[3], usually without consent from or compensation for creators of the source material[4] and oftentimes causing DDoS attacks against FOSS infrastructure in the process[5] (which in turn force the deployment of challenge-based protections and increase cost and complexity of self-hosting for everybody[6]). Furthermore, they are being used to undermine labor and justify layoffs[7]. These are harms that we do not want to perpetuate, even if only indirectly.

( https://docs.nura.eco/policies-and-processes/development/ai-... )

If you really believe that AI tools are automatically unethical because they destroy the environment, harm workers, and constitute an attack on FOSS infrastructure, then it doesn't really matter how the tool is being used. If you just don't want to see code quality decline, then it's probably not a problem.

From 2.4.55 through 2.4.70? Jokes on you, my version is not that new!

I'm guessing you missed out on Heartbleed too :P At work we managed to upgrade to a vulnerable version 1 month before that came out .... ugh

Well I know someone who will get bitten - a couple of years I did some work (because security said so) to make sure we always pulled latest Apache when building our Docker container. Someone ripped that change out not long ago because it was too hard to maintain the Debian repo config changes needed to pull it in, and as a result they'll probably get stung by having a version right in the meaty part of that range.

all my handwritten sockets servers are fine because I use HTTP/1.1

I have 1 apache acting as a proxy for vhosts and

> a2dismod http2

gives me

> Module http2 already disabled

I don’t want to tempt fate (and hackers ) but I have dodged lots of major vulns this year with my strategy of writing code by hand instead of pip installing everything

only vuln I was exposed to was copy.fail, but that was a defense in depth weakness, and I was vulnerable to the kvm weakness if there was a malicious tenant in my host’s hypervisor, but that’s not fair I’m poor so I don’t have a dedi.

maybe the tcp vuln was the most exposed I’ve been but that was a very short window that got auto upgraded by apt with a high attack complexity

maybe I can write about how I survived 2026 without getting a supply chain vuln and get some work or students on new years? I feel that’ll be a pretty big accolade.

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If I understand correctly that only affects reverse proxy chains, which people might just not have. Or not have in a way that is vulnerable to that?

I guess it makes sense that "the cloud" moves to it, but beyond that, it might be fine?

Even Apache is being filled with Claude commits, so great.....

I don't know why your comment is dead, but I meant in general perching_aix , it's just what I noticed looking up this

You prefer to leave it insecure?

It was a comment unrelated to this vulnerability

The C chansaw juggling doesn't get any safer from adding threads. Is the robust original (pre)fork configuration still supported?

I don't know, but Claude is fixing that too! (doubt that makes it safer either...)

I run apache with prefork on my personal sites. Still works. No idea if it supports http/2.

I have a lot of Linux sysadmin experience but haven't touched Apache in more than a decade. I thought it's mostly nginx or other solutions at this point.

At least 21% of web sites use Apache httpd, and of course many sites don’t report the software used at all. Nginx is also frequently used as a reverse proxy, with Apache used behind it.

At work we use Apache because of mod_shib. We have yet to try nginx-http-shibboleth.

Default Wordpress docker image uses it.

Apache has plenty of life left, it just works™, supports almost everything, and currently is about as efficient as nginx WRT connection handling. Sometimes you want what .htacces gives you. (No built-in Lua though.)

i mostly use nginx lua to patch on some feature i had even on bare Apache, let alone all the core modules.

Why would I not use apache if everything already works with it for me?

Apache has mod_md -- an acme client, which lets you obtain https certificates as easily as on caddy, without integrating with awkward separate programs.

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/mod/mod_md.html

nginx has that too https://blog.nginx.org/blog/native-support-for-acme-protocol

My whole selfhosted mess is built around Apache. It was what I started with and I haven't run into any edge cases that it can't cover.

Exactly the same for me! I could switch to Nginx, it's one prompt away probably, but why?

I am the same way. I use Caddy if I can. But I have a lot of docker containers running apache and nginx. You probably might too.

Apache has a feature that no other http server has replicated: .htaccess files.

They provide limited configurability of server functionality within a webroot. That's extremely convenient for PHP webapps. For many PHP apps, deploying them on anything that is not apache means touching the server config itself.

PHP can go to hell. My hair is gray because of it. Nginx is superior, and I can get anything imaginable done with config files. And not to mention, it's much faster.

The http servers drag race finished 15 years ago on a tie, it's really much a matter of taste and familiarity more than performance at this point.

The lazy bastard in me prefers Caddy.

I don't understand this. NGINX can run PHP. PHP is not exclusive to Apache.

Eh. You can use .htaccess in nginx too. I use that everyday.

Does not Microsoft's IIS also have that with web.config files?

I would say that's actually a misfeature as it requires too many additional filesystem lookups to fulfil requests.

Modifying the web server config is a nonissue outside of shared hosting, which should have died out with the advent of VMs/containers.

> … too many additional filesystem lookups …

Caching is a thing. Only dump the cache when a changed is noticed.

And now you have 2 problems..

[delayed]

This took 7 minutes and $0.02 in deepseek spend through a subscription to reproduce.

Disabling h2 is the mitigation and is effective. The patch itself seems a little odd as a fix to me personally, but eh.

Did it manage to produce a PoC for RCE? Apparently Redhat claimed there's a RCE, while Wiz said they don't have one.

http2 race??

What exactly is the issue and does nginx have it

HTTP2 is insecure and 1.1 is slow. At this point just find a good H3 implementation and drop the old protocols.

Not everything benefits from pipelineling and multiplexing. I wish there existed a protocol that's even simpler than HTTP 1.1, which would be good for exposing APIs. Something like Thrift, but maybe even simpler and more bulletproof.

Well there's HTTP/0.9. Can't get much simpler than that.

Patch looks like https://github.com/apache/httpd/commit/5ed39287660daacd1233c...

No CVSS severity level?

NIST doens't show one (yet?). I checked on RedHat and they list it at a 9.8

That's crazy high.

LiteSpeed and OpenLiteSpeed affected by this?

what is amazing, there are no apache updated containers / packages available yet.

At least disabling http2 is an easy countermeasure that will probably in most setups not have any real downsides.

If it was even enabled that is.

Why are these things being disclosed before fixes have been rolled out? Is no-one following disclosure protocols any more?

Debian tracker: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2026-119618 - hopefully the fix lands soon

Debian has been patched just now and updates available : apache2 2.4.71-1~deb13u1

Wiz is such an amazing company. Israeli-based and recently acquired by Google, the significance of their security contributions cannot be overstated.

Time for a Rust based httpd replacement like https://xin.dev

How would Rust have fixed this security issue?

They've published an article last month on the Nginx vulnerabilities in light of their Rust implementation.

https://xin.dev/blog/multiple-nginx-vulnerabilities/

If you’re going to respond, at least make an attempt to answer the question.

One of the core claims of the language is data race safety because in safe rust, no memory location can be written by two or more owners at the same time. (see https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/races.html for a more detailed discussion) Consequently, the kind of memory corruptions that this vulnerability seems to exploit are not possible in safe rust. Now, we don't know if a hypothetical rust-based apache implementation would have reached for unsafe in this context or done any other wild thing, but it's fair to assume that the likelihood of an exploitable RCE through memory corruption trends towards zero in programs written in Rust.

> > a concurrent execution race condition within the assign_headers() function when handling shared resources [...] can corrupt heap memory to achieve arbitrary code execution (RCE)

To my understanding, in safe Rust to share between threads the compiler will require something like Arc<Mutex<...>> - which prevents unsynchronized access or freeing while another thread is still using it.

The details I've seen are too sparse to say with certainty, but it seems like the issue is concurrent access to the same value through a pointer.

In particular it's `req` in the function with this signature:

    static void assign_headers(request_rec *r, const h2_request *req,
                               int no_body, int is_connect)

The fix being:

                - apr_table_setn(req->headers, "Content-Length", "0");
                + apr_table_setn(r->headers_in, "Content-Length", "0");

My read on this is that `req` is meant to be a readonly value in this function, which is why it's marked `const`. And being readonly, it would be safe to access concurrently. However, someone accidentally wrote through this pointer.

In Rust this would've been `req: &h2_request` and the accidental write wouldn't have been possible (barring interior mutability). Even with interior mutability there is no thread interleaving during the write, which happens through a `&mut h2_request` probably obtained through a lock.

Cannot find the source... (Wanted to see if they use the RusTLS)

this looks vibecoded which is probably even worse

This has not been a good month for the LAMP stack…

gno.security/repairer

I don't understand what they mean by "51% of cloud environments" have a publicly exposed instance. What is a "cloud environment"? Do they mean a cloud hosting provider like AWS or Google? Are they saying that between those two only one of them has an instance of a vulnerable Apache server running?

I think they’re likely referring to either a Cloud Org (AWS Organisation, Google Cloud Org, Azure Tenant).

Wiz works by plugging their tool into your Cloud Org, so presumably they’re saying 51% of their enterprise-y customers have an exposed instance.

My guess is that they are collecting stats on running HTTP daemon software and thus they estimate that 64% of "cloud accounts" have Apache somewhere, and 51% of the total are publicly exposed instances (not on VPCs and such).

As they make a note that this does not account for configuration, so if you've got the http2 module disabled, it sounds like you are protected — though they only recommend hard-coding the protocol version to 1.1 instead of disabling the module (I've got the module disabled as that was the default when I set up my homelab server, for instance).

duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50453368

[delayed]

why? mod_mpm_event is what can be assumed to be the default since apache 2.4 (± 2012):

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mpm.html#defaults

[delayed]

What is the benefit of using Apache over enjinx?

Apache is more opinionated, some people like that.

(I personally think it's slow and ugly, but to each their own)

Depends on use-case. As a reverse proxy I might use Caddy, for no fuss https. I prefer Apache over nginx for modules that are not available in the later, or they are not for free.

> in Apache HTTP Server’s HTTP/2 module (mod_http2)

I feel like in hindsight, HTTP/2 was a mistake. The theoretical benefits just don't justify the added complexity. It definitely shouldn't have been fasttracked like it was.

I don't think it was fast tracked. Was it? I heard the rational to do HTTP 2 and soon later HTTP 3 was to split improvements and ease transition.

HTTP/3 was the real mistake. It basically reimplements TCP on top of UDP and from my testing (at least the existing implementations) it generally performs worser then HTTP/2. Even when testing on somewhat a bit lossy connection.

But if you have more then one httpd server - eg. some fcgi - then HTTP/1.1 is almost architectural backdor: HTTP Request Smuggling, at minimum.

Apache even don't have it's own HTTP/2: mod_http2 use external library nghttp2[.org] so Apache is dead shell at this point.

For anyone temporarily shutting off an Apache httpd, there's one step that's sometimes missed: a cron job or systemd timer for certbot. This can restart httpd and leave it running. In other words, in some common uses of Let's Encrypt, standard instructions such as "systemctl disable --now apache2" aren't sufficient to keep httpd off.

If I need to make sure apache doesn't restart I often type "syntax error" on the first line of httpd.conf

everybody new Vulnerability makes me think how we are not so good a writing secure code?.

[delayed]

Appears to be the first issue ranked 'critical' since 2021. https://httpd.apache.org/security/vulnerabilities_24.html