PHP apps plagued by Mark of the Beast bug

[yuvadam]

TFA is plagued with technical inconsistencies, and generally looks like a classic copy-paste job.

Either address a technical crowd, and use proper technical terms, or use plain language anyone can understand.

"GET protocol"?

"adding a “-ffloat-store” flag to CFLAGS"??? Do they even know what this means?

[veb]

It really sounds like someone needed something to write so they come to HN and write a article based off what everyone in the thread has said without adding anything of value.

[Udo]

It's worth noting that a simple input-sanitizing if statement applied across the $_REQUEST variable can eliminate this vulnerability, a measure that every PHP dev can use right now regardless of admin access to compile a new executable.

Also, yesterday, there was a poster in here claiming that PHP's json_decode() of an object like {"motb":"2.22507385851e-308"} would trigger the vulnerability whether the number was enclosed in quotes or not. I have since determined that this claim is false, json_decode() did not trigger the problem with or even without the quotes. In fact, the only way I was able to reliably cause the crash was by casting variables from the $_REQUEST array as float - a behavior that can be safeguarded against pretty easily.

Obviously, this is a serious issue, but it's an attack apps can be hardened against with minimal effort. For comparison, a buffer overflow vuln on the string type would be much, much more disastrous. So we're going to have to run an extra line of input sanitization for a while, that's all.

[RobertKohr]

Would the code be:

  foreach($_REQUEST as $var=>$val){
     if($val=='22250738585072011')
        $_REQUEST[$var] = NULL;
  }

[dmoney]

Is Mark of the Beast a common term for this type of bug (triggered by a certain number)? Never heard it before.

[Refringe]

I haven't heard it used this this type of situation before, but I believe the Mark of the Beast is commonly referenced as an "evil number", so I suppose it works in this instance.

What it actually means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_the_Beast