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Comment by pinevale | Hacker News Reader

I've seen many posts like this. None of them stood the test of time. Ease is irrelevant because you only need expertise once and then everyone can reuse the result.

It's also not easy to pop an iPhone, but reliable, weaponized exploits are available in trade and governments use them in a plug-and-play way.

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The specific controversy here is about the disclosure timeline. Some people allege that the disclosure and patch release of this vulnerability were mishandled; others dispute this. The dispute turns crucially on how available exploits were during the embargo period. Nobody is arguing that the vulnerability doesn't need to be patched at all. (The PHP core team didn't initially treat it with much urgency, but they've acknowledged that this was a mistake.)

> The dispute turns crucially on how available exploits were during the embargo period.

I sure hope thats not true.

All signs indicate that writing a self-replicating exploit that'd flood the internet without warning is possible. All we know is that nobody did.

A lot of websites - especially the ones who made the call to go down first like government / healthcare - do not have the luxury of taking any risk.

Writing this blog post with the "hindsight" of no exploit going viral for several hours after the patches is - let me be frank - complete bullshit; and i dont want this person anywhere near an important system.

If by next _year_ nobody has proven a successful consistent hack, then we can start to doubt the videos. If there is, then all of this has been warranted.

I think it's entirely possible that the released exploit and the early released video are independent of each other. The video contains a couple of hints and stack traces, so someone could've used that to pinpoint the problem and write an exploit of their own (or, based on the website it appeared on, had an LLM generate one).

On the other hand, Chainguard did release their patches before the agreed upon time, proving they can't be trusted if you're working on coordinated patch releases. That was an absolute mess.

Time is the whole point though. Everyone was terrified and shutting their websites down because they believed the exploit would be running wild on the internet in between it hitting git and them being able to update the server.

If it takes a week to come up with a working exploit code, the critical services have time to update.

With AI i think it's safe to assume it would only take hours after you give it what/where to look

Time is part of the point, but it is not the whole point. The whole point involves the fact that this impacts two decades worth of PHP versions. Even if it took months to exploit, there is going to be a long, long tail of breaches against ill-maintained legacy sites.

Yes, but that's not really relevant to the controversy over the embargo.

Neither the OP nor any comment in this chain of replies is about the embargo?

The controversy over the embargo is why the post was written and why we're talking about this at all.

Huh, I thought we were talking about this because it's a massive security breach offering approximately unconditional RCE against half of the servers on the open web.

The specific reason for the current degree of consternation, to the point where many websites went down preemptively which didn't happen even with Log4Shell, is that for about half a day there were multiple alleged proofs-of-concept circulating on Twitter while the PHP Foundation refused to release the patch. If that hadn't been the case, we'd still be having a conversation, but a different one.

Suppose hypothetically there was no disclosure period at all. Suppose that at the time the PHP team made the announcement that there was an unmitigable unconditional RCE against ~every version of PHP with advice to take servers offline, they had just been made aware of it themselves, and simply did not have a patch ready yet. The pre-emptive taking of servers offline until a patch was available, the OP blog post that was written, and this comment thread would all still apply the same. Nothing in this thread was in any way related to the embargo period. It is extremely weird that you came into a thread irrelevant to the embargo and told me my comment was irrelevant to the embargo, and then have stuck to your guns arguing this incessantly. The embargo and the severe vulnerability are related. They are not the same thing, and much of the conversation would in fact be exactly the same regardless of the embargo.

There's no need for an embargo before the patch is available, because the core team can just not tell anyone. It's only once there is a patch that the decision has to be made whether to embargo it.

But just because there isn't a working PoC on GitHub doesn't mean there isn't one and things aren't been actively exploited.

If you are a bad actor you probably don't share your PoC around as it means less boxes to hit.

You can never rule out the possibility that someone interested in attacking you has a non-public exploit, but it's dramatically less likely if there aren't already working exploits circulating all over the internet.

It was true before great LLMs era

I don't think that's very true. Certainly, modern LLMs make it much easier to discover a vulnerability given only limited clues—but if it's easy to find that way, then probably someone will do that and post it for clout. So if no one has, then it probably isn't.

That "if" is load bearing and increasingly flat-out false.

Crowdstrike's average "breakout times", the time gap between a first successful infiltration and maximal exploitation, has gone from days or hours prior to 2024 to minutes or seconds now.

AI makes developing this exploit faster though

Time is not the whole point. How are people in this thread this clueless?

Risk is the whole point. The websites going down first were government / healthcare.

Do you expect these websites to take the risk? Risks that you now feel is justified because hindsight seemed to have collapsed the possibility-space?

We can talk about this again next year; if still nobody has demonstrated a working consistent attack that _could_ have pwnd my gov and medical records, then we can reflect on the severity score and the response.

ease is somewhat relevant initially, since it determines how quickly you have to patch before exploits start popping up. I would be extremely curious to see if anyone has been pwned by this already, especially before the public release of the patches (not that I doubt it, but I heard some people saying they saw attempts in their logs, but not really enough information to tell whether they were understanding their logs correctly. The situation just seems a bit murky and unclear to me).

> Ease is irrelevant because you only need expertise once and then everyone can reuse the result.

Not if your LLM relies on existing code and you collectively create a million repos with hallucinated broken implementations that do not work before a good public exploit exists, which later LLMs rely on. LLMs are self-defeating that way.

I guess the main takeaway is: we (humans? current methodology?) are bad at estimating how urgent a fix is or needs to be.

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