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ircmaxell's Blog

A blog about PHP, Security, Performance and general web application development.

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Latest posts

Wiring a Home Network

Last year, my partner and I moved into a new (to us) house. One of the first things I needed to get done was to get our home network setup as we both were (still are) working from home due to COVID-19. This post will explore some of that process, some of the decisions I made along the way, what I learned, and some details on the end setup.

A PHP Compiler, aka The FFI Rabbit Hole

It’s no secret that I’m into building toy compilers and programming languages. Today I’m introducing something that’s not a toy (I hope). Today, I’m introducing php-compiler (among many other projects). My hope is that these projects will grow from experimental status into fully production ready systems.

Protecting Against XSS In RAILS - JavaScript Contexts

Recently my team was working to implement Brakeman in our CI processes to automatically scan our codebase for security vulnerabilities. Among a few other issues, it identified a handful of similar XSS vulnerabilities of a similar pattern: < script type = " text/javascript " > var FOO = "<%= raw whatever %>" ; ReactDOM . render ( < Blah foo = { window . FOO } / > , document . getElementById (…

Disclosure: WordPress WPDB SQL Injection - Technical

Today, a significant SQL-Injection vulnerability was fixed in WordPress 4.8.3. Before reading further, if you haven’t updated yet stop right now and update. The foundations of this vulnerability was reported via Hacker-One on September 20th, 2017. This post will detail the technical vulnerability as well as how to mitigate it. There is another post which deals with the background and time-lines .

Disclosure: WordPress WPDB SQL Injection - Background

Today, a significant SQL-Injection vulnerability was fixed in WordPress 4.8.3. Before reading further, if you haven’t updated yet stop right now and update. The foundations of this vulnerability was reported via Hacker-One on September 20th, 2017. This post will detail the background on the vulnerability as well as why I publicly threatened to Fully Disclose. There is another post which deals with…

Ponderings on Odoriferous Syntactical Constructifications

(AKA: “Thoughts on code smells” and how “high brow” they have become) We have a habit of talking about “code smells” to indicate patterns and practices that our experience has shown can be problematic. Many of these “smells” are backed by a lot of data and really are legitimate problems to avoid. These are constructs and tools that often have few legitimate uses. But many so called “smells” really…

Building an 8-bit Computer

I have been building a computer. Not assembling components, but actually designing and wiring it from scratch onto prototyping breadboards. I’ve decided to start writing about the project here on my blog. I have no idea how many posts this will wind up being, or if there even will be others. Let me start by telling you what I’m building.

Trust

Stop and take a moment to think about how much trust is required to live your everyday life. Every single aspect of your life is built up on layer after layer of trust, it’s nothing short of staggering. Different aspects of life will contain different levels of trust, with some being very guarded and some being very lax. We don’t often talk about this trust and we often make the blind assumption…

All About Middleware

Last week, a proposal to standardize middleware for PSR-7 was introduced to the PHP-FIG. The general concept of middleware is not a new one, and has been in use in the PHP world for many years. Several people have raised significant concerns with the proposal, which have gone completely unheeded by the author. Let me go through the most major of these concerns, as well as show what a better…

Simple, Easy, Risk and Change

I’ve been thinking a lot about change lately. Things finally resonated to me after listening to Uncle Bob Martin on No Capes . He made an amazingly interesting point about change and different methods for minimizing the risk over time of change. I want to share some of what I’ve been thinking about along those lines. What follows is a collection of some of my evolving thoughts relating to change…