Comment by discostrings

2 years ago

Blog post on wordpress.org concerning this: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/secure-custom-fields/

> There is separate, but not directly related news that Jason Bahl has left WP Engine to work for Automattic and will be making WPGraphQL a canonical community plugin. We expect others will follow as well.

Anything to prop up their position and throw the company they are attacking under the bus. What a jerk.

  This is a rare and unusual situation brought on by WP Engine’s legal attacks, we do not anticipate this happening for other plugins.

Yeah, that is not how trust works.

> This update is as minimal as possible to fix the security issue.

What is the actual issue? CVE number?

  • The diff contains two (identical) changes that aren't just ripping out upgrade notices for the pro version: Two functions that stop callbacks from accessing $_POST now also stop them from accessing $_REQUEST, which also contains everything in $_POST. Also confirmed by WP Engine's update notice[1].

    I honestly don't see why anyone would treat this as a security issue. Everything involved is PHP code that can do whatever it wants, not in any kind of sandbox.

    Edit: And even if it were this update doesn't fix the problem. POST variables can still be accessed:

        filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'name');
    

    [1]: https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-6-3-8-security...

  • I can’t find the actual number because Automattic’s tweet[1] announcing it has been deleted, but it’s the one mentioned in the ACF 6.3.8 release notes[2]. The authors of ACF can’t upload that version to wordpress.org themselves because Matt banned them from there before making the announcement.

    ETA: Matt says[3] it’s a different vulnerability. Anybody willing to break out the almighty diff?

    [1] Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821829