alt Hacker News"No successful PHP2Shell exploits seen so far"... in the wild, specifically in Wiz's honeypot. The vulnerability itself has been successfully exploited, most notably for the "Steal my Bitcoin" challenge [1] as one example.
Dan Guido, of Trail of Bits, claims they have an "universal" exploit [2]. Knowing their track record, I don't currently have a reason to doubt this claim.
[1]: https://stealmybitcoin.com/
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50226010
EDIT: The HN title has been changed since posting this comment.
Replies
More details about stealmybitcoin in LiveOverflow's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhNiMWtOutw
This is the winner: https://github.com/KillaBoi/StealMyBitcoin-PoC
The challenge website was not exploitable at launch because it wasn't actually running PHP; it got cracked in two hours aftewards
In the video, LiveOverflow shows his exploit that reliably gets RCE from two requests.
> claims they have an "universal" exploit
That's not correct. He claims they have A exploit. Based on the nature of the vuln, I assume every one that works in the are would be very careful to claim a universal exploit, and the comment by Mr. Guido seems to be align with that.
> This looks like a trap. We have a working RCE that would claim this, but I don't want to demonstrate that because it might leak what we built to others. We still have a window for people to patch and I don't want to risk that.
So what he seems to be saying (My interpretation) is "I don't want to demonstrate thus risking giving ideas to other people regarding hhow to build exploits"
The steal my bitcoin exploit works for a specific stak, and that is the reason why the person that set that up did publish certain information in the site itself (reduced phpinfo)
The steal my Bitcoin challenge was nothing like a realistic common PHP setup. It was a extremely unrealistic and stupid setup, using the built in php dev server. It's even explicitly stated that it should never be exposed to the internet.
If it needs to hit the same worker to get it to work, that is a whole other problem, and that was not a part of the steal my bitcoin challenge. And what if pm.max_requests is set to 1? Is it then 100 % safe, as it respawns for each requests, making any statement for an universal exploit completely BS, or is a single requests exploit possible?
As far as I know, there has been no proven vulnerability on a modern PHP (production) stack. The "Steal my Bitcoin" challenge was a toy project. The "lab" target used the embedded PHP server (`php -S`) which is for development only.
> Warning. This web server is designed to aid application development. [...] It should not be used on a public network. https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.webserver...
There are 3 main PHP interfaces (SAPI):
1. mod_php which is obsolete and requires Apache prefork (which should also be avoided)
2. php-fpm (FastCGI) which has been the default for more than a decade.
3. FrankenPHP is a new official interface much more suitable for containers.
There were 2 vulnerabilities.:
1. "OOM corruption". The advisory says there was a proven exploit with mod_php, but only for that obsolete SAPI. "Source analysis therefore supports FPM as a susceptible, though *no complete FPM exploit* has been demonstrated for this SAPI."
2. "stale global state". The advisory is The last PHP release (8.5) was vulnerable when the debug parameter fatal_error_backtraces was on. There was a suspicion that an exploit could exist in the session code for php-fpm, but it was unproven and probably unrealistic.
The "evidence" given at the end of the article seems old news to me. The honeypot was based on Apache-prefork + mod_php. As stated in the CVE, there is a proven exploit for that (obsolete) stack.
Just last week companies were saying php2shell has been rampant for months, but if that were the case, wouldn't we all have strange errors in our logs? Something seems fishy to me.
What have they done to earn 100% of your trust?
It's funny that when stealmybitcoin.com was posted on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224916) there were hundreds of top voted comments saying "see no one has been able to steal it, the reported vulnerability was fake, it's all AI marketing" etc.
Since it was successfully exploited there has been zero further discussion, and I bet most people who participated in the original thread aren't even aware.