Trying to Find a Bug in WordPress

2023-06-11

[public] 58.8K views, 4.68K likes, dislikes audio only

I stumbled over some WordPress code involving caching. Immediately I had this idea about MD5 collision and how this could affect the implemented logic. I started going down a rabbit hole exploring the feasibility and eventually setting up a PHP debug environment. Only to realize that the idea was flawed from the start. So while this ends up being failed security research, we still learn a lot along the process.

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get_page_by_path: https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/get_page_by_path/

Hash Collision Overview: https://github.com/corkami/collisions#fastcoll-md5

MD5 Collision Demo: https://www.mscs.dal.ca/~selinger/md5collision/

Is there an ASCII only MD5 hash collision? https://twitter.com/LiveOverflow/status/1664280653519810563

Wordpress docker image with xdebug: https://github.com/wpdiaries/wordpress-xdebug

Debugging wordpress with xdebug: https://www.wpdiaries.com/wordpress-with-xdebug-for-docker/

What is a Server? /youtube/video/VXmvM2QtuMU

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Chapters:

00:00 - Intro

00:36 - Finding the Research Topic

03:03 - Dumb Ideas Are NOT a Problem

03:40 - "What happens with a MD5 Hash Collision?"

04:38 - MD5 Hash Collision Feasibility

09:25 - WordPress Development Environment

11:18 - Debugging PHP

12:57 - Configuring xdebug

14:42 - Realizing the Research Idea was Flawed

15:58 - What we learned from the failed research

17:10 - hextree.io

17:47 - Outro

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