If I had details on a RCE like this I'd report it but if I got no response for a WEEK I'd be trying other venues.
We don’t know when it went from a “memory safety issue” to “php2shell/RCE”.
Calif’s report is a little light on timelines, but reading between the lines, it seems they took a while to turn this into an actually exploitable vulnerability.
Finally, at least pre-LLM (and maybe a bit outdated now), responsible security disclosure norms is that you usually do wait for vendor (up to 90d) if there’s no signs of active exploitation. Even if it’s a RCE. Actually, especially if it’s a RCE.
The last thing you wanna do is go pinging random non-security PHP contributors or maintainers and have it leak with zero patch. That is truly the worst outcome.
Yes, this is bad, but also, it’s apparently been bad for decades; and it could’ve been much worse.
In the link from the comment to which you replied, buried deep below the comic strips and all that, there is this explanation which seems to confirm your guess:
> Right. We should explain from the start. My first step of finding if any long-lost siblings of Stefan's 2004 bug were still lingering in the codebase was to look for ways to exceed the memory_limit that allows us to throw a controllable fatal. I asked my LLM companion for help.
> The first useful finding was a way to bypass the smaller post_max_size barrier that normally prevents a request from delivering enough memory pressure to reach memory_limit. PHP compares post_max_size with the declared Content-Length before automatic POST parsing begins, but it does not enforce the same limit against the bytes it actually consumes. Apache can therefore pass a chunked HTTP/1.1 or lengthless HTTP/2 multipart request with no meaningful declared length. A configured input-decompression filter creates the same mismatch between the compressed length and the decoded stream.
> The second useful finding was a way to exhaust memory_limit with a multipart request that remains below post_max_size. An RFC1867 file-upload part with filename="" contains no file data, and PHP does not count it toward max_file_uploads. PHP still creates all six corresponding $_FILES entries: name, full_path, type, tmp_name, error, and size.
i highly doubt it. these are pretty big names in the security sector who have plenty of experience reporting high severity vulns.
That said, PHP team handled this poorly. How does letting everyone know so they can "prepare" help anyone at all. It just creates panic.
General industry practise (or at least google) is to wait 90 days of being ignored before trying something else. And google got hugely criticized in the beginning for only waiting 90 days. You are suggesting this person should only wait a week before going full disclosure? They would be crucified if they did that.
If you have a bad process, fix the process.