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points by colemannugent 15 hours ago | 0 comments

Reading this I'm almost certain the firewall vendor is Palo Alto Networks. They included a PAN-OS setting verbatim and the SELinux config matches my experience.

[–] nubinetwork 10 hours ago

> Since this discovery, the Dream research team has been sharing updates and collaborating on an investigation with Palo Alto Networks, the vendor of the firewall in question. More information is available on the Palo Alto Networks website. Additional details are now included in the post itself.

[–] theMMaI 14 hours ago

Further indication is that PHP 7.4.33 and PHP 8.30.0 are mentioned which are an exact match for PAN-OS 11.1/11.2 and 12.1/12.2 respectively

[–] elevation 14 hours ago

Why does a world-class firewall stack need PHP? I'm sure PAN-OS has some neat DPI features, but I would love to see firewalls that are implemented in FPGA, where the tasking was compiled down to gates to be performed deterministically, much like the low port count network switches we have today.

[–] tredre3 13 hours ago

What else would you use to power the configuration gui frontend? Allow me to eliminate some of the obvious and inevitable answers:

- Rust didn't exist at the time

- Go didn't exist at the time

- nodejs didn't exist at the time

- Java and Python likely used too much resources for a once-in-a-while used GUI

Irrational hatred aside, that's literally what PHP was designed for.

[–] elevation 11 hours ago

> Irrational hatred aside, that's literally what PHP was designed for.

Yes, in 2005 you choose PHP, but in 20 years of operation, you don't revisit reconsider your architectural considerations? A fantastic avenue for hardening any product would be to replace a ~2MSLOC component (the PHP interpreter) with a 10K SLOC daemon that does only what you need.

When you're a startup, expediency and funding prevent this, but by the time you're selling "solutions" and baking designs into ASICs you could have prevented this attack by putting a fraction of the effort into software.

[–] ferngodfather 9 hours ago

This is great to say with the benefit of hindsight but nobody is changing the underlying language of their well established product for literally no reason.

And that is even with the assumption that other languages don't have issues - they do.

[–] Dylan16807 8 hours ago

> literally no reason

PHP being big and creaky was very well known. This has nothing to do with hindsight.

And it still is big and creaky. You can cite this comment the next time something like this happens to prove it's not hindsight bias.

> And that is even with the assumption that other languages don't have issues

Incorrect. Please do not strawman.

[–] deadbunny 9 hours ago

At which point during that 20 years do you decide to rewrite a ton of your production code just to change languages?

[–] fn-mote 8 hours ago

When you are making a lot of money and have a security analysis of your stack.

[–] raptor99 5 hours ago

I wonder if that's why Palo and PanOS have had so many vulnerabilities this year and last

[–] 0xbadcafebee 4 hours ago

I get that logically you would think that a very wealthy company would improve their technology once they had the resources to do that. But companies do not run by logic. They run by humans, making human decisions, motivated by almost every conceivable thing except logic.

> When you're a startup, expediency and funding prevent this, but by the time you're selling "solutions" and baking designs into ASICs you

.... are still run by the same startup people who think "working like a startup" was a good idea in the first place.

Right now I work with a bunch of people who came up working for startups. They are responsible for the products that make the company the most money. They are still on PHP 7.4.

[–] citrin_ru 11 hours ago

Lua? Tcl? both AFAIK have less vulnerabilities than PHP likely thanks to smaller code size.

[–] cesarb 13 hours ago

> What else would you use to power the configuration gui frontend?

Perl?

[–] seanhunter 12 hours ago

For some reason I’m not allowed to respond to the child comment so I’m putting this here:

Perl 5 was released in 1994. Palo Alto Networks was founded in 2005, so Perl 5 was certainly available when they built their first products and would have been a superior choice to either PHP or Perl 4.

[–] ExoticPearTree 8 hours ago

When discussing programming languages, you need to take into consideration how easy it is to find developers with experience on a certain language.

Sure, you can do web apps in Perl with Catalyst or other frameworks, but the PHP developers are easier to find.

And then, after you develop entire GUIs in a language, it is a herculean effort to port that to another.

And lastly, JavaScript has its own issues too.

[–] j16sdiz 3 hours ago

We were talking about early 2000s.

Perl 5 was the language of choice for CGI in that era, but PHP borrowed some of perl syntax and quickly displaced Perl in web usage.

Some perl programmers migrated to Embperl, but it didn't gain much momentum.

[–] Dylan16807 8 hours ago

We're talking about an html GUI right? That's not herculean to port between languages.

[–] topham 12 hours ago

You win.

Perl 4 specifically of course though.

[–] bigbuppo 11 hours ago

That's for mission-critical load-bearing infrastructure hidden behind modernized interfaces. Nobody has touched that script in 33 years.

[–] tiberious726 12 hours ago

This makes me kinda furious. The us government makes me do so much goddamned work to comply with their cyber security regulations (only about half of which actually contribute to my security posture), and here they are running their fucking firewall management page publicly exposed (the globalprotect portal was not vulnerable, only the _actual_ management page).

[–] acdha 9 hours ago

Remember that the non-defense sector of the government has been having cuts for decades and lots of important work is outsourced to rotating contract teams. This is definitely unacceptable but I'd bet there were more than a few people there who were profoundly unsurprised that the backlog caught up with them.

[–] WarmWash 12 hours ago

The government tends to have the magical combination of total power combined with low to moderate skill.

[–] goldie_wilson 10 hours ago

The title is misleading as the article says "including systems in a US government-affiliated environment" which reads more like a 3rd party the government is contracted with versus actual government systems.

[–] clbrmbr 14 hours ago

public markets point to FORTINET