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points by elevation 12 hours ago | 0 comments

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 11 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 9 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 7 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 6 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 7 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 6 hours ago

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

[–] raptor99 3 hours ago

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

[–] 0xbadcafebee 2 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 9 hours ago

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

[–] cesarb 11 hours ago

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

Perl?

[–] seanhunter 10 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 6 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 1 hour 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 6 hours ago

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

[–] redundantly 4 hours ago

The difficult part isn't rendering the UI, it's the work that's done between the UI and the back end components/services that's difficult. PHP is used for more than just web pages.

[–] Dylan16807 2 hours ago

But that glue is pretty straightforward and you only have to convert one page at a time.

[–] topham 10 hours ago

You win.

Perl 4 specifically of course though.

[–] bigbuppo 9 hours ago

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