Steal My Bitcoin CTF PoC

To be fair, the person who created the challenge stated that is was a fairly standard setup, replicating something outside a lab, but in reality is was something completely different, and not anywhere near how PHP is usually used.

It used the development server in PHP, and did not even run requests with fpm or mod_php. Instead, it used the built in dev server of PHP, and just proxied requests from nginx to the php dev server.

Literally the first thing on top of the PHP docs about the dev server used here is this: "Warning This web server is designed to aid application development. It may also be useful for testing purposes or for application demonstrations that are run in controlled environments. It is not intended to be a full-featured web server. It should not be used on a public network."

That is not something people do, and it also explains why the site was down all the time, cause the dev server is super slow, as it's not meant for this in any way shape or form. A real setup would add a few zeros to the requests per second a server could handle.

So all in all, this was very pointless, as it was nothing like real php sites. A shame, cause a realistic setup woild be more interesting and relevant to answer the question of how hard is it really to gain RCE on a normal site.

I believe this managed to prove something.

Namely that the vulnerability was not that easy to exploit, meaning that the myriads of servers that stayed unpatched during those initial days are probably not all members of botnets now. (Contrary to what the discourse might have made it seem like.)

I actually had GLM 5.3 run against the site on the day, but it was around 2 am and I was pretty sleepy by 3. GLM found the memory overflow vulnerability but I stopped it before it could continue into retrieving something useful from it.

In retrospect, I should have just given it a /goal and let it run overnight.

As an outsider this was fun to watch. Namely, the dozens of l33t haxors including so-called "professionals" who claimed they'd be able to solve this in a jiffy with their magic exploits, yet couldn't.

This is already linked by it's author in the Steal My Bitcoin thread (585 points, 458 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224916

Does php2shell works with PHP-fpm nginx? I can’t truly replicate that poc locally.

Related: https://x.com/JamesPavur/status/2114501212313653696

Apparently the wallet key wasn't on the server, like some in the original thread suspected, but perhaps not due to maliciousness after all.

between the challenge being updated to actually run php and this only like 2-3 hours passed

This was good wholesome fun! Some foundation should do this for future cve's