Radar · 2023-09
September 2023
Chrome ships an in-the-wild heap overflow in WebP, an unauthenticated remote code execution in Craft CMS scores a straight 10.0, Drupal's JSON:API module can cache error backtraces for anonymous users, Node 16 reaches end of life on 11 September 2023, and Amazon Bedrock reaches general availability in two US regions and no others.
What's on our radar this month: releases, advisories and standards across the stack we run and the platforms we integrate with.
AI platform and models
Sections- notable AWS
Bedrock reaches general availability in two US regions and no others — aws.amazon.com
Amazon Bedrock went generally available on 28 September 2023 with foundation models from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI and Amazon. The launch regions were US East in Northern Virginia and US West in Oregon, and only those two. AWS says Bedrock is the first to offer Meta's Llama 2, in fine-tuned 13B and 70B parameter versions, as a fully managed API. Day-one capabilities included provisioned throughput for reserved capacity, HIPAA eligibility, GDPR compliance support, CloudWatch metrics and CloudTrail API auditing.
The region list is the detail to get right, and it is the one most often skipped. AWS launched Bedrock only in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon), so any Australian workload using it sends data to a United States region. A contract or proposal claiming Australian-hosted AI on Bedrock is not supportable. Check the data-residency wording in any such document before relying on it.
Update, October 2023: AWS added Asia Pacific (Tokyo), making three Bedrock regions.
Update, April 2024: Bedrock became available in Asia Pacific (Sydney) on 9 April 2024.
- fyi Anthropic
Amazon invests up to four billion dollars in Anthropic — anthropic.com
Announced 25 September 2023, three days before Bedrock's general availability. Amazon would invest up to US$4 billion for a minority stake, AWS became Anthropic's primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, Anthropic gained access to AWS Trainium and Inferentia silicon for training and inference, and Bedrock support expanded to include secure model customisation and fine-tuning. Anthropic's corporate structure and Long Term Benefit Trust were stated to be unchanged. Named early enterprise users included LexisNexis Legal and Professional, Bridgewater Associates and Lonely Planet.
This is why Claude on Bedrock became a durable path rather than a one-off model listing, and it is the right citation when explaining how an AWS-based stack offers Anthropic models on first-party terms. It changes nothing about data residency — the region constraint above still applies, and the two facts get conflated regularly in vendor material from this period.
- fyi Anthropic
Claude Pro launches, still without Australia — anthropic.com
Claude Pro launched on 7 September 2023 at US$20 or £18 per month, offering roughly five times the free tier's usage, priority access at peak times and early access to features, on top of Claude 2. Availability was limited to the United States and the United Kingdom.
Note the geography for the third time this year: claude.ai remained US and UK only through September 2023. Australian organisations experimenting with Claude in 2023 were doing so through the API or through Bedrock, not the consumer product — worth knowing when a shadow-IT review turns up claims that do not fit.
Security and edge
Sections- critical libwebp
Chrome patches an in-the-wild heap overflow in WebP — chromereleases.googleblog.com
Google shipped Chrome 116.0.5845.187 on 11 September 2023 for Mac and Linux, and 116.0.5845.187/.188 for Windows, with a single critical fix: CVE-2023-4863, a heap buffer overflow in WebP. It was reported on 6 September by Apple Security Engineering and Architecture with Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School. Google is aware that an exploit exists in the wild. The CVE record places the flaw in libwebp, the WebP library, and lists libwebp 1.3.2 as the fixed release. A duplicate record, CVE-2023-5129, was published on 25 September and rejected by Google two days later.
Treat this as more than a browser update: the flaw is in libwebp, not Chrome's own code. Anything in the estate that decodes user-supplied WebP needs libwebp 1.3.2 or later, not only a Chrome bump — optimisation and resizing in a CDN pipeline, thumbnailers, WAF content inspection, headless-browser rendering. Container base images need rebuilding rather than restarting.
- notable curl
libcurl accepts unlimited response headers — curl.se
CVE-2023-38039, announced 13 September 2023, is that libcurl imposed no limit on the size or quantity of headers it would accept in an HTTP response, so a malicious or compromised server could exhaust the client's heap simply by streaming headers at it. It affects libcurl 7.84.0 through 8.2.1 and is fixed in 8.3.0, which introduces a 300 KB cap on total header size per response and rejects anything larger. The advisory rates it Medium.
This one points the wrong way round from the usual advisory, and that is why it matters for a CDN or proxy operator: the threat is the upstream, not the client. Any component that fetches from an origin you do not fully control is exposed — origin shield, remote image fetcher, webhook client, link unfurler. Upgrade libcurl to 8.3.0 or later, and where you can, set your own response-header size limit at the proxy rather than inheriting a library default.
- notable OpenSSL
OpenSSL corrupts XMM registers on Windows — openssl-library.org
CVE-2023-4807, published 8 September 2023 and rated Low, is Windows-on-x64 only. The POLY1305 MAC implementation fails to restore non-volatile XMM registers correctly on newer x86_64 processors that support AVX512-IFMA, corrupting the state of the calling application. It only bites when POLY1305 calculates a MAC over data larger than 64 bytes, most often as part of ChaCha20-Poly1305 — and since a malicious client can influence whether a server uses that cipher, this is not an exotic condition. Fixed in 1.1.1w, 3.0.11 and 3.1.3.
If you terminate TLS on Windows, land 3.0.11 or 3.1.3; on Linux edge nodes this is informational only.
Standards and compliance
Sections- notable eSafety
eSafety accepts a search-engine code that covers generative AI output — itnews.com.au
The eSafety Commissioner had reserved a decision on the Internet Search Engine Services code in June after Microsoft and Google announced generative AI in search. The revised code was accepted in early September, reported on the 8th, and eSafety's register records it as registered on 12 September 2023. It requires search providers — Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo among them — to ensure AI-generated child sexual abuse material is not returned in search results and cannot be synthesised by generative AI built into the search product. eSafety says the code comes into effect six months from registration. eSafety was also preparing draft industry standards for two further sectors, designated internet services and relevant electronic services, after declining to register their codes.
Existing content codes get read onto AI features rather than waiting for new law. Relevant to any team adding AI search or summarisation to an Australian site.
- fyi Privacy Act
The Government answers the Privacy Act Review — ag.gov.au
Published 28 September 2023, seven months after the February report, the Government's response to the Privacy Act Review's 116 proposals committed to strengthening privacy protections and giving businesses clarity on what information the Privacy Act covers. Reforms agreed in principle were left for further work: targeted consultation on small business privacy reforms, private sector employee privacy and privacy reforms affecting journalism and research, supporting a detailed impact analysis of their benefits and costs.
This is the document that told Australian organisations which Review proposals the Government would take forward, and the pattern it set is the lesson: accept in principle, then legislate a subset. Teams that treated February's report as a build specification over-invested, which is why the 2024 amendments landed narrower than 2023 commentary predicted. Read the response rather than the report when scoping privacy work from this point.
- fyi OAIC
Breach notifications fall while the worst case grows — oaic.gov.au
The Notifiable Data Breaches report for January to June 2023, published 5 September, records 409 notifications, down 16 per cent on the 486 notified in July to December 2022 — but it includes one breach affecting more than 10 million Australians, the first notification under the scheme to reach that scale. Cyber incidents caused 42 per cent of all breaches at 172 notifications, led by ransomware at 53, compromised or stolen credentials at 50 and phishing at 33. Contact, identity and financial information remained the most commonly exposed categories.
The falling count against a rising worst case is the read to take away: notification volume is not the risk measure, blast radius is, and a half-year that looks better on the headline number contains the first breach to affect more than 10 million Australians. Two figures are directly usable in a business case — compromised credentials at 50 is the argument for MFA and privileged access work on a web and CMS estate, and ransomware at 53 is the argument for testing restores rather than backups.
CMS and platforms
Sections- notable Craft CMS
Craft CMS takes a straight 10.0 — github.com
CVE-2023-41892, published 13 September 2023, is an unauthenticated remote code execution flaw rated CVSS 10.0, affecting Craft CMS 4.0.0-RC1 through 4.4.14 and fixed in 4.4.15. The advisory describes it as a high-impact, low-complexity attack vector. Patching alone is not sufficient — Craft instructs operators to regenerate the security key with the setup/security-key command and update CRAFT_SECURITY_KEY across production systems.
Any Craft 4 site not on 4.4.15 by mid-September should be treated as potentially compromised rather than merely unpatched: rotate the security key and review for web shells. The key rotation is the step most likely to be skipped, because it is in the advisory rather than the release notes and it requires coordinating an environment variable change across every production system at once.
- notable Drupal
Drupal poisons the cache with JSON API backtraces — drupal.org
SA-CORE-2023-006, CVE-2023-5256, rated Critical at 16 out of 25. The JSON:API module can emit error backtraces containing sensitive information, and when those responses are cached they become readable by anonymous users, enabling privilege escalation. Affected are Drupal 8.7.0 to 9.5.10, 10.0.0 to 10.0.10 and 10.1.0 to 10.1.3, fixed in 9.5.11, 10.0.11 and 10.1.4. The core REST module and the contributed GraphQL module are unaffected, as is Drupal 7.
Patch, or uninstall JSON:API if it is not used. Then do the part the exposure implies: because it lands in the cache layer, any site fronted by a CDN or reverse proxy needs its caches purged after patching. A fix does not evict an already-poisoned cached response, so a patched site can keep serving the leaked backtrace from the edge until someone purges it.
Supply chain, CI/CD and IaC
Sections- notable npm
npm package provenance reaches general availability — github.blog
Provenance went generally available on 26 September 2023, five months after April's public beta. Publishing with provenance verifiably links a published package back to its source repository and build instructions. The requirements at general availability are a supported cloud CI system — GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD — public packages only, and public source repositories only, the last of these following July's withdrawal of provenance from private repositories. npm now validates the linked source commit and repository at display time and shows an error if either has been deleted or made private.
For any public npm package you ship from GitHub Actions, add id-token write permission and the provenance flag to the publish step. It is close to free and it is the clearest single signal a consumer can check. This closes an arc that ran the whole year — beta in April, dangling-source warnings in July, the private-repository restriction two weeks later, and general availability here.
- notable GitHub Actions
The Node 16 to Node 20 transition gets a date — github.blog
Announced 22 September 2023 because Node 16 had reached end of life eleven days earlier. Workflows using Node 16 actions begin emitting deprecation warnings from 23 October 2023, with full migration targeted for spring 2024. Action authors must move their actions to run on Node 20, and workflow consumers must move to action versions that support it. Self-hosted runners need v2.308.0 or later to run Node 20 actions at all.
This is a dated maintenance obligation rather than a warning, and the self-hosted runner requirement is the part that bites — Node 20 was only added to the runner in v2.308.0, so a fleet running in ECS or EC2 on an older runner version has no Node 20 to run those actions with, and runner image versions are rarely pinned anywhere visible. Audit published actions still on Node 16, then check what runner version your own infrastructure is actually on. This is the second Node change in Actions this year, after GitHub began enforcing Node 16 over Node 12 on 14 June.
- fyi OpenTofu
OpenTofu goes from fork to governed project — linuxfoundation.org
Two dates. On 5 September the OpenTofu repository went public and buildable, with official releases not yet available; the first would be 1.6.0-alpha, forked from the most recent commit still under MPL. On 20 September 2023 the Linux Foundation announced OpenTofu as a neutrally governed open-source successor to the MPLv2-licensed Terraform, backed at launch by over 140 organisations and 600 individuals with pledges of a minimum of 18 full-time developers over at least the next five years, and committed to backward compatibility.
Foundation hosting is the substantive change rather than the fork itself — it removes the single-vendor relicensing risk that caused the split, and a funding floor turns a protest into something you can plan against. If you publish a Terraform provider, expect eventually to publish to two registries. OpenTofu named an initial registry as one of two items to finish before the alpha, because HashiCorp's registry terms limit it to use with Terraform, and that is the piece that reaches provider authors: a fork without a provider registry cannot resolve your provider.
Languages, runtimes and frameworks
Sections- notable Go
Go 1.21's new toolchain feature was dangerous for a month — pkg.go.dev
Go 1.21.1, 1.20.8 and 1.19.13 shipped on 6 September 2023. The standout is CVE-2023-39320: the go.mod toolchain directive introduced in Go 1.21 can execute scripts and binaries relative to the module root whenever the go command runs inside that module, whether the module came from the module proxy or directly from version control. It affects cmd/go from go1.21.0 before go1.21.1. Also fixed were CVE-2023-39318 and CVE-2023-39319 in html/template, mishandling HTML-like comments and special tags within script contexts.
Anyone who adopted Go 1.21.0 early must move to 1.21.1, because the headline convenience feature of the August release was actively dangerous for its first month. The general lesson is worth banking: the new feature in a major release is the least-tested code in it, and being first to adopt is a security decision as much as a productivity one.
- notable Node.js
Node 16 reaches end of life seven months early — github.com
Per the release team's schedule data, Node 16 was first released 20 April 2021, entered Active LTS on 26 October 2021, moved to Maintenance on 18 October 2022 and reached end of life on 11 September 2023. That date was brought forward by seven months from the original April 2024. The Node.js project gave the reason: Node 16 shipped with OpenSSL 1.1.1 because release timing did not allow OpenSSL 3, and OpenSSL 1.1.1 was scheduled to reach end of life on 11 September 2023. Keeping Node 16 supported past that point would have left it on an unsupported OpenSSL for its final seven months.
Take the date from the release team's schedule data rather than the original April 2024 figure. Anything on Node 16 was unsupported from 11 September; the targets were Node 18, then in Active LTS, or Node 20, scheduled to enter Active LTS on 24 October 2023. It is also a good example of a support window shortening because of something underneath it, which is not how most people model end-of-life dates.
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