Really not looking forward to a regulated software industry. It will cause a lot of gatekeeping and bureaucracy. It's one of those things that may seem good, but in practice, it's pure waste in every way imaginable. Will just lead to exclusivity, gatekeeping and artificial friction. This is a hill I'm willing to die on. Those making software have plenty of incentives to make it good, and bad software is punished already to the fullest extend (because it's not fun to get compromised or your reputation ruined; this is a natural incentive)
I still deploy a bunch of simple sites, built around the CGI::Application framework.
I understand how they work, I'm familiar with HTML::Template, and related modules, so I can hack up a quick interactive/dynamic site in a couple of hours.
They're no longer things I'd run on the public internet, but for quick internal things it's very easy to deploy a container with a perl backend.
Everytime I read one of these it always boils down to the same thing..Don't solve solved problems. And the best code in this case is code you didn't write as PHP's session handler is battle-tested but every line you write to roll your own is a line you have to secure, maintain, and eventually patch at 2am when someone finds the bug.
Session handling, auth, crypto, password hashing etc - all these are the exact areas where you should be the most allergic to rolling your own. Not because you're not smart enough, but because a simple bug like sanitizing in the wrong place and the failure is catastrophic like in this instance.
Use boring, proven, widely-audited solutions. Save your creativity for the actual problem you're solving.
I doubt the mantra of "don't roll your own Auth/crypto" - especially if it lives on a server where the code can't be inspected.
Sure, there will be more bugs in my code, but the attackers will be putting far more scrutiny into a widely used library.
Some deliberately hilariously weak auth I built decades ago is only just now starting to get broken into by AI bots, whereas any vulnerable wordpress was broken into within days.
I tend to agree and I often strongly recommend to my clients to choose battle tested off-the-shelf solutions for these problems rather than roll their own, but...
Sometimes it makes sense to roll your own and the cost of a dependency isn't worth it. This can be especially true when you need to accommodate many bespoke environments and you end up needing to make little accomodations here and there. Can create a very unpleasant situation when you don't own the code.
I'm not a cryptographer but I've spent a significant portion of my career focusing on the security-side of things and I've rolled my own auth quite a few times on very public projects you can access today and I've never had any significant findings through repeated pentests.
But that's just the thing: I did it the right way, and there is a right way to roll your own stuff, to forge it in a way it comes out suitable. Is it bug free? Probably not, but I feel significantly better about it having thoroughly tested it by myself, my colleagues and paid professional penetration testers.
I couldn't easily find an answer but I'd like to know if this implementation has been validated by a professional or not.
Oooooh that's really bad. Wordpress on Cpanel sites is like the Dark Matter of the internet, it's everywhere and you don't see it until something bad happens. Libations for the sysadmins patching & cleaning up this mess.
90% of those sites don't have anything resembling a sysadmin. If they've not already been hijacked by one of the Wordpress vulns or hijacked plugins years ago, they will be now. And absolutely nobody will spend any effort to fix them, so they will just end up chugging along until safebrowsing flags them and basically removes them from the internet.
Something that is starting to concern me with the flood of cyber chaos in the past couple of months is my homelab. Currently I do not have it set up to be accessible outside the local network and then add it and all my other devices to my tailnet to facilitate remote access (via an exit node on my local network). On top of that TrueNAS doesn't seem to have the best update cadence so I'm worried about having a system with known vulnerabilities only protected by not being accessible remotely in theory.
definitely don't expose any management interfaces to the open internet.
personally, i manage my homelab through ssh via the commandline, and key-based ssh auth is secure enough for my threat model (i am considering switching the entrypoint machine to a BSD though, to avoid the kind of bugs distros sometimes introduce).
but a webserver and a few containerized services seem pretty low risk to me, so i do have a few of them exposed via reverse proxy. The more sensitive one behind Authelia via the forward-auth pattern, which i feel like is a really good fit for homelabs.
I like how the vulnerability is in the path that (a) attempts to write the password in reversibly encrypted form to disk [0] and (b) has a weird fallback path that writes it in clear text. Sigh.
[0] cPabel seems to be from 1996. We’ve known this is a mistake since before 1996.
What a shame that I no longer have access to my teenage-level conscience, I am sallivating at the idea of going wild with this and the Copy Fail cve.
The potential here to do all kinds of manipulation for search engines / AI tools is enormous. Perhaps the more scary thought is that someone could easily make an agent that would exploit both bugs to wipe out servers.
Good on these companies to publish their findings straight away as I'd imagine that both bugs would have fetched quite a lot on the black market.
cPanel being the backbone of the internet's cheap hosting layer was already a monoculture risk waiting to bite us - turns out we didn't have to wait long
This flurry of activity is certainly going to have people be more apprehensive about unproven software that may be of dubious prominence. My question amid all of this is who else knew about these long-standing vulnerabilities?
I really feel I have to shill for Fastpanel (www.fastpanel.direct) when it comes to graphical web server UIs.
A couple of years ago I got really sick and tired of cPanel, and started trying all these alternatives. I'm not an Arch Linux SSH freak, I need a GUI. And none of the panels had old school functions like setting up FTP and such.
So good luck to the Estonian (I think?) developers of Fastpanel and good riddance to that bloated slug cPanel.
FWIW, a sharp and immediate uptick in support tickets from self-identified WHM resellers and admins who need backups from their rsync.net accounts right now.
I would think that for everyone that needs some help, there must be 10 who self served…
30 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 52.9 ms ] threadI understand how they work, I'm familiar with HTML::Template, and related modules, so I can hack up a quick interactive/dynamic site in a couple of hours.
They're no longer things I'd run on the public internet, but for quick internal things it's very easy to deploy a container with a perl backend.
Session handling, auth, crypto, password hashing etc - all these are the exact areas where you should be the most allergic to rolling your own. Not because you're not smart enough, but because a simple bug like sanitizing in the wrong place and the failure is catastrophic like in this instance.
Use boring, proven, widely-audited solutions. Save your creativity for the actual problem you're solving.
Sure, there will be more bugs in my code, but the attackers will be putting far more scrutiny into a widely used library.
Some deliberately hilariously weak auth I built decades ago is only just now starting to get broken into by AI bots, whereas any vulnerable wordpress was broken into within days.
If you rolled your own crypto and didn't install AF_ALG, you would have avoided copy fail.
Even in this case if you had implemented your own control panel, you wouldn't be hit.
Actually roll your own, don't add dependencies
Sometimes it makes sense to roll your own and the cost of a dependency isn't worth it. This can be especially true when you need to accommodate many bespoke environments and you end up needing to make little accomodations here and there. Can create a very unpleasant situation when you don't own the code.
I'm not a cryptographer but I've spent a significant portion of my career focusing on the security-side of things and I've rolled my own auth quite a few times on very public projects you can access today and I've never had any significant findings through repeated pentests.
But that's just the thing: I did it the right way, and there is a right way to roll your own stuff, to forge it in a way it comes out suitable. Is it bug free? Probably not, but I feel significantly better about it having thoroughly tested it by myself, my colleagues and paid professional penetration testers.
I couldn't easily find an answer but I'd like to know if this implementation has been validated by a professional or not.
https://copy.fail
personally, i manage my homelab through ssh via the commandline, and key-based ssh auth is secure enough for my threat model (i am considering switching the entrypoint machine to a BSD though, to avoid the kind of bugs distros sometimes introduce).
but a webserver and a few containerized services seem pretty low risk to me, so i do have a few of them exposed via reverse proxy. The more sensitive one behind Authelia via the forward-auth pattern, which i feel like is a really good fit for homelabs.
yikes. https://www.shodan.io/search?query=basic+realm%3D%22cPanel%2...
[0] cPabel seems to be from 1996. We’ve known this is a mistake since before 1996.
The potential here to do all kinds of manipulation for search engines / AI tools is enormous. Perhaps the more scary thought is that someone could easily make an agent that would exploit both bugs to wipe out servers.
Good on these companies to publish their findings straight away as I'd imagine that both bugs would have fetched quite a lot on the black market.
A couple of years ago I got really sick and tired of cPanel, and started trying all these alternatives. I'm not an Arch Linux SSH freak, I need a GUI. And none of the panels had old school functions like setting up FTP and such.
So good luck to the Estonian (I think?) developers of Fastpanel and good riddance to that bloated slug cPanel.
Low key wonder if people using LLMs to scan these old code bases for corner case issues and fining treasure troves of exploits.
I would think that for everyone that needs some help, there must be 10 who self served…
They should have switched to a web framework long ago