Yet another Hacker News

PHP2Shell: AI uncovers critical RCE in PHP

247 points danlark1 1 hour ago 64 comments

pettijohn 1 hour ago | parent

Silly question, is PHP part of Project Glasswing? Crazy this has been dormant for a decade. And scary to wonder what else is lurking out there.

Maxious 1 hour ago | parent

The OpenAI post linked says Sol assisted https://openai.com/index/coordinated-disclosure-of-critical-... and they invite more open source projects to apply to their program https://patchtheplanet.org/

rs999gti 1 hour ago | parent

Lots of stuff is PHP e.g. most message boards. It was very popular pre-dynamic web.

dd8601fn 1 hour ago | parent

I just got a nostalgia hit remembering all the phpBB type boards.

But also I haven’t seen much of that style of bulletin boards in ages. Maybe the occasional EEVBlog or Ars kinda count?

bombcar 1 hour ago | parent

phpBB, vbulletin, and XenForo still power more than you might realize - often websites that still have comments are using one of those as a back-end, even if you can't access it directly.

rkozik1989 1 hour ago | parent

How dare your forget PHPnuke.

whycome 1 hour ago | parent

It’s still popular af. Almost half of any cms site online is powered by Wordpress. Many sales sites use woocommerce (Wordpress plugin). Message boards for sure (phpbb!). Moodle and other similar learning management tools run on PHP. Other cms systems like drupal and joomla make up another big portion of cms installs. I think the custom Wikipedia (mediawiki?) is php.

apocalyptic0n3 55 minutes ago | parent

It's still the most widely used server side language on the web thanks to WordPress, unless that has changed recently (it was dropping)

sehw 1 hour ago | parent

Ye, no humans but "AI".

dewey 1 hour ago | parent

Grinding through abandoned source code in hopes of finding a vulnerability isn't exactly the most fulfilling work for many, perfect use case for AI which doesn't sleep.

dspillett 1 hour ago | parent

Apparently both bugs had been reported previously, pre-AI, if so some important questions need to be asked about how those reports slipped through without a fix.

tchalla 1 hour ago | parent

> We used Wiz Atlas, Gemini 4 Argon and GPT-5.6 Sol throughout this research. Notably, Gemini 4 Argon made an invaluable contribution to finding the vulnerability, exploit development, attack detection, and validation of the patch.

evandena 1 hour ago | parent

a little self promotion there :P

krelian 1 hour ago | parent

First the product they sell, then the product they got early access too...

I know they waited two months with this but wouldn't it be wiser to wait just a little bit more than a few minutes after the fix released?

NoahZuniga 1 hour ago | parent

Wiz is a google company...

asbv-1qq 1 hour ago | parent

The flaw was in at least 20 year old code, which seems to be a common theme for AI discoveries.

No compute costs for finding the issue or for writing the exploit are disclosed.

But it is marketed as if it were the first RCE found in human history.

pixl97 55 minutes ago | parent

Eh, it's an RCE that's been around forever and runs on a pretty large number of websites. Worse a lot of businesses have things like wordpress sites so one of those getting compromised is a foot in the door allowing movement into the more protected areas of the network.

So yea, it's a big deal.

SoftTalker 40 minutes ago | parent

Web servers should not be a foot in the door. They should be assumed hostile and stringently limited. PHP especially has been notorious for remotely exploitable bugs but that's probably more due to its popularity and wide use by beginners than it being strictly worse than any other stack in this regard.

nope1000 48 minutes ago | parent

I like to be AI sceptical as well but I think it's even more noticeable if the flaw is in 20 year old code which thousands of people have read and reviewed and not noticed, isn't it?

ashfg1 42 minutes ago | parent

Hardly anyone reads and reviews in open source. It is a myth from ESR. Probably one person wrote it and another one said LGTM.

pizzafeelsright 39 minutes ago | parent

The recent signed keys being '4' is an example.

Looks good, validates, works, and then trust is assumed.

pizzafeelsright 40 minutes ago | parent

I discovered a large security concern that has existed for a decade, since the code was originally written. I was working on an unrelated task when my AI agent discovered an oversight because the agent happen to examine that file.

Everything was sound and every test passed for years along with every security scan because intent was not validated.

I would expect an unending source of exploits in the future until AI rewrites everything.

simonw 1 hour ago | parent

Timeline from that article:

August 19, 2026: Wiz Research discovers the first PHP vulnerability using Wiz Atlas, Gemini 4 Argon, and GPT-5.6 Sol.

August 20, 2026: Unauthenticated RCE is confirmed against Drupal.

August 21, 2026: Unauthenticated RCE is confirmed against WordPress.

August 24, 2026: Wiz Research reports the vulnerabilities to the PHP security team.

September 21, 2026: PHP acknowledges the reports and begins developing a coordinated fix.

October 21, 2026: Patched PHP releases become available.

October 21, 2026: Public disclosure.

I want to understand how it leaked. I guess a whole lot of people were looped in between September 21 and October 21?

projektfu 1 hour ago | parent

Simon, it seems you spend too much time close to the AIs and your writing is getting flagged.

bombcar 1 hour ago | parent

Two months is way too long for this, and the people involved seem to not know the "way" to do this - it shouldn't have taken a month from "reports" to "PHP acknowledges" which smells like "we sent an email or filled out a web form" when the ACTUAL reporting mechanism is "we talked to our friends at <MAJOR DISTRO> or <WORDPRESS> who called the right people and a patch is being slipped in."

mjr00 1 hour ago | parent

> I want to understand how it leaked. I guess a whole lot of people were looped in between September 21 and October 21?

Yes. I was at AWS when Spectre and Meltdown were discovered, and we received approximately a month of advance notice and put together teams to apply mitigations. The work of the team was on a need-to-know basis--even team members' managers only knew they were pulled onto a critical project, not what the specific project was. But there were still 30+ people in the company who knew, and that was just one company (I'm guessing Google/Azure/other cloud providers got similar advance notice).

Now, this is a much wider scale vulnerability, in the sense that Spectre/Meltdown primarily impacted cloud providers, but this attack impacts literally anyone who runs PHP. Dozens, if not hundreds, of companies likely got advance notice that a patch needed to be installed. In those companies there are teams of people applying those patches. All it takes is one of them who wants 15 minutes of internet fame to leak the details.

geerlingguy 59 minutes ago | parent

Even some smaller vulnerabilities are spread through hosting companies pretty quickly within a day or two prior to public release, to give teams time to make sure staff will be ready to patch immediately.

The wider the pre-release news spreads, the more chance you get someone who will spill the beans (intentionally or not).

its606 1 hour ago | parent

It would have been nice if there had been time for downstream distributors to patch as well.

Good4boothee 1 hour ago | parent

> I want to understand how it leaked

If I understand correctly someone showed off a video of exploit in action - just like the ones included in article - and the visible messages were enough for other LLM users to discover the exploited bug.

simonw 52 minutes ago | parent

How did the person who shared the video hear about the exploit?

Were they already looped in or was it circulating outside of the trusted group already?

Topfi 1 hour ago | parent

Can anyone explain the two month window between reporting and disclosure? I do understand Responsible Disclosure as a concept, but looking at the timeline and severity, I struggle to understand the timing, especially the month that passed before an acknowledgment.

Edit: Apparently this had been reported more than half a decade ago [0]. I am getting more confused the more I look into this, hopeful for a well written, factual post-mortem from someone who hasn't actively avoided PHP for the last decade.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50181395

phoronixrly 1 hour ago | parent

Can anyone explain the lack of the irresponsible disclosure in the 'Responsible' disclosure timeline? The one that happened just before the coordinated release?

edh649 1 hour ago | parent

Seems to have been prompted from research by calif.io who started disclosure on August 11 vs Wiz on August 24th? A bit unclear on the participants and how they all interacted... https://calif.io/php2shell/

geerlingguy 1 hour ago | parent

One pattern of AI-assisted writing I hate is that technical articles now read as Atlantic journalistic tech-noir stories, which require scrolling through 20+ pages of content to get to the meat of a post.

pizzafeelsright 46 minutes ago | parent

I generally click away when I see comic book style writing.

himinlomax 38 minutes ago | parent

You're supposed to ask your agent to summarize it for you, I guess.

mg794613 51 minutes ago | parent

I'm so tired of some of these "research setups", do you really need a logo, a brand and everything setup so you can cash in? Was this truely a problem or artificially created?

Especially after fumbling it like this.

"Buy our product, because we found a bug", yeah and you leaked it too.

wildmXranat 48 minutes ago | parent

Did anyone find a reputable source for code which can be used to validate fixes ?

jongjong 48 minutes ago | parent

Damn. I've been saying that writing correct software is almost impossible.

I suspect it's a matter of time before all mainstream blockchain projects are cracked. Many of those projects are hundreds of thousands of lines of code. There's no way they don't have vulnerabilities given that AI is now uncovering so many vulnerabilities in such high exposure projects.

I was a code minimalist before, now I'm a radical minimalist. We need to get the lines of code down to the absolute minimum.

Attack surfaces need to be clearly defined, enumerable and testable under all possible conditions.

wat10000 42 minutes ago | parent

That's why so much emphasis is now placed on trying to make incorrect software either fail to build or fail at runtime in a way that doesn't let people take over the computer. C makes it extremely likely that a random correctness issue will be a security issue. Newer languages much less so. They're far from perfect but it's a lot better.

NooneAtAll3 46 minutes ago | parent

Ai fumbles responsible disclosure*

airtnp 45 minutes ago | parent

Ok, based on my reads on Wiz and Calif writeups, there are 5-6 issues mapped to 2 CVEs.

Wiz (with GPT 5.6 Sol + Gemini 4 Argon) : Remote process-memory disclosure; OPcache type confusion; Fatal-error backtrace UAF. POC on Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla

Calif (with LLM, no specific model, but model is accessible to all): Zend HashTable OOM. Targets PHP-FPM and mod_php.

Both discovers the UAF on upload progress unserializer.

Surprised to see the anime girl dancing with POC is really uploaded by Calif researchers.

airtnp 44 minutes ago | parent

BTW, the backport fix seems to disable session upload entire in old version, not fixing the issue like new versions:

https://github.com/php/php-src/commit/712e60f9edfd03f0960fc4...

processunknown 41 minutes ago | parent

Whats the issue with the POC video? I dont understand why thats surprising

airtnp 35 minutes ago | parent

Before the official fix someone published it, and it seems the person is not associated with Calif: https://x.com/k_firsov

echoangle 30 minutes ago | parent

How did they get access to the script though? The output seems to be identical to the real PoC, so it looks like the same script.

echoangle 31 minutes ago | parent

Don't you think the style of video looks a bit unprofessional? It's like the next iPhone being presented by the Apple CEO but using a vTuber avatar with subway surfer gameplay in the background.

chuckadams 34 minutes ago | parent

Both of them memory safety issues. C is just not fit for purpose in this decade.

wren6991 30 minutes ago | parent

Did an LLM do the write-up? Half of the "technical deep dive" was just re-stating earlier statements about scope and impact, and I left without a solid grasp of the mechanics of the exploits.

nananana9 23 minutes ago | parent

Why would you want to know how it works? Don't you worry your pretty little head about it, the super geniuses at OpenAI and their super AGI who found this super scary bug will will give you a patch.

But be careful, updating packages can be difficult, here's a MD file for you to give the super genius AGI to tell it how to apply it for you.

eptcyka 25 minutes ago | parent

I guess I should update my nextcloud.

No, scratch that. I should replace it with something that is not a trash fire.