Radar · 2024-04
April 2024
ACSC warns that a PAN-OS GlobalProtect command injection is being exploited, a command injection in Rust's standard library on Windows is rated critical, CONTINUATION frames break many HTTP/2 implementations, Amazon Bedrock reaches the Sydney region and WordPress 6.5 ships with the Font Library and plugin dependencies.
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 Bedrock
Amazon Bedrock reaches the Sydney region — aws.amazon.com
On 9 April 2024 Amazon Bedrock became generally available in Asia Pacific (Sydney), with foundation models from Amazon, Anthropic, Cohere and Mistral available at launch. The announcement names providers rather than specific model identifiers.
Re-test latency and model availability from ap-southeast-2, and revisit the data-residency caveats in existing AI service descriptions and security documentation. Region availability is not model availability — check that the specific model identifiers you depend on resolve in-region before making residency claims to an agency.
- notable ASD
ASD co-seals seven-agency guidance on deploying AI systems securely — media.defense.gov
Published 15 April 2024 by the NSA's AI Security Center with CISA, the FBI, ASD's ACSC, Canada's CCCS, NCSC-NZ and NCSC-UK, the guidance is organised into securing the deployment environment (governance, boundary protection, hardened configuration), continuous protection (cryptographic validation, API security, model-behaviour monitoring, model-weight protection) and operation and maintenance (access control, audits, penetration testing, logging, secure deletion).
Map your AI service architecture against the three sections. The model-weight protection and API-exposure items are the ones most likely to appear in a tender security questionnaire. This is joint NSA-led deployment guidance that ASD's ACSC co-authored.
- notable Anthropic
Long context windows turn out to be a jailbreak surface — anthropic.com
Published 2 April 2024, Anthropic's many-shot jailbreaking research shows that filling a prompt with up to 256 fabricated dialogues in which an assistant answers harmful questions makes the model answer the real question. Effectiveness scales with context length, and larger models are more vulnerable because they are better at in-context learning. Prompt classification and modification cut attack success from 61 per cent to 2 per cent in some cases.
If you run retrieval-augmented generation, treat retrieved chunks as untrusted input and put classification in front of the model rather than relying on its refusal training. Anyone building RAG stuffs large volumes of retrieved text into context, and this is the paper showing that text is not inert.
Security and edge
Sections- critical PAN-OS
PAN-OS GlobalProtect command injection exploited before a patch existed — cyber.gov.au
ASD's ACSC published an alert on 12 April 2024 covering CVE-2024-3400, a command injection in the GlobalProtect feature of PAN-OS that allows an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the firewall. ASD's ACSC is aware of exploitation of this CVE, and Canada's Cyber Centre said the same day that Palo Alto Networks expected to release fixes by 14 April.
Confirm any PAN-OS estate reached a patched release and treat pre-patch exposure as compromise rather than vulnerability — root on a perimeter firewall means every credential that transited it is suspect.
- notable HTTP/2
CONTINUATION frames break many HTTP/2 implementations — kb.cert.org
CERT/CC published VU#421644 on 3 April 2024: many HTTP/2 implementations fail to limit or sanitise CONTINUATION frames within a single stream, so an attacker sending unbounded frames without END_HEADERS causes memory exhaustion, or CPU exhaustion through HPACK Huffman decoding. Named implementations include Node.js (CVE-2024-27983), Go's net/http and net/http2 (CVE-2023-45288), Apache httpd (CVE-2024-27316), Envoy and Apache Traffic Server.
Confirm every HTTP/2 termination point is on a patched build. CERT/CC says implementations differ; apply the vendor fix for each front door. This is a protocol-layer flaw, so the blast radius is your whole HTTP/2 front door rather than one product.
- notable TLS
Chrome 124 launches hybrid post-quantum key agreement for TLS — developer.chrome.com
Chrome 124, released 16 April 2024, launched the X25519Kyber768 hybrid key agreement for TLS. Google describes it as a hybrid X25519 and Kyber768 key agreement, launched as a TLS cipher, that should be transparent to users.
Test TLS termination and any middlebox in the path after Chrome 124. Google has said the Kyber key share adds over a kilobyte to the TLS ClientHello and that some middleboxes failed on hardcoded message-size limits. If a site started failing to connect from Chrome 124, this is the first thing to check.
Standards and compliance
Sections- notable eSafety
eSafety tests the Online Safety Act's removal powers against X and Meta — esafety.gov.au
eSafety's register of proceedings records eSafety v X Corp, NSD474/2024, for alleged non-compliance with a class 1 removal notice issued in April 2024. eSafety says it issued class 1 removal notices to Meta and X Corp on 16 April over video of the Wakeley stabbing. Meta quickly removed the identified material; X Corp did not satisfy eSafety, and the Federal Court granted an interim injunction giving X Corp 24 hours to comply.
If you host user-generated content for an Australian audience, confirm you have a named contact and a takedown path that can act within a day. eSafety went from removal notice to a Federal Court interim injunction in under a week.
Update, June 2024: eSafety discontinued its Federal Court case against X Corp over the Wakeley video, consolidating the dispute in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
- fyi NIST
NIST releases four draft AI publications at once — nist.gov
Announced 29 April 2024, the drafts cover generative AI risk management as a companion profile to the AI Risk Management Framework, secure software development practices for generative AI and dual-use foundation models, a plan for global engagement on AI standards, and guidance on reducing risks from synthetic content.
The generative AI profile is the one to read if you are writing AI risk documentation — it maps generative-specific risks onto a framework many organisations have already adopted, which is cheaper than starting again.
- fyi IETF
RFC 9567 defines DNS error reporting — rfc-editor.org
Published 26 April 2024 as a Proposed Standard, RFC 9567 lets a resolver report DNS resolution failures back to an authoritative server's designated monitoring agent, so an operator learns that clients cannot resolve their zone — most usefully for DNSSEC validation failures, which are otherwise invisible to the zone owner.
Worth knowing if you run authoritative DNS: DNSSEC misconfiguration is normally discovered by a user complaint, and this is the mechanism designed to replace that.
CMS and platforms
Sections- notable WordPress
WordPress 6.5 ships with the Font Library and plugin dependencies — wordpress.org
Released 2 April 2024, WordPress 6.5 delivered the Font Library, the Block Bindings API, the Interactivity API, Plugin Dependencies via a new Requires Plugins header, AVIF support, a Script Modules API and an overhauled HTML Tag Processor. The minimum MySQL version rose to 5.5.5. WordPress 6.5.2 followed on 9 April with a fix for a cross-site scripting flaw in the Avatar block; 6.5.1 was never released because of a packaging issue.
Check MySQL versions against the 5.5.5 floor before upgrading, and audit custom plugins for the Requires Plugins header. If you crawl WordPress to static, test the Interactivity API's output — it changes what a crawler sees on the page.
- notable WordPress
Unauthenticated SQL injection in the LayerSlider plugin — nvd.nist.gov
Published 3 April 2024, CVE-2024-2879 affects LayerSlider 7.9.11 and 7.10.0, which fail to escape a user-supplied parameter in the ls_get_popup_markup action and do not adequately prepare the resulting SQL, letting an unauthenticated attacker extract database contents. Fixed in 7.9.12 and 7.10.1.
Inventory LayerSlider across the estate and confirm 7.9.12 or 7.10.1. This is the archetypal WordPress exposure: vulnerable code that was never in core and never in your repository.
- notable Drupal
April's Drupal contributed-module advisories include a critical access bypass — drupal.org
Drupal's contributed-project security window on 24 April 2024 produced the month's only two advisories. SA-CONTRIB-2024-017, rated critical (16/25) and tracked as CVE-2024-13253, is an access bypass in Advanced PWA inc Push Notifications, fixed in 1.5.0. SA-CONTRIB-2024-018 is a moderately critical (14/25) information disclosure in REST Views. Contrib advisories cluster on the Wednesday security windows and are easy to miss if you only watch core.
Run drush pm:security or check the available updates report after each Wednesday window, and subscribe the team to the contrib advisory feed rather than only the core one.
Supply chain, CI/CD and IaC
Sections- notable Open source
xz-style social engineering attempts surface against JavaScript projects — thehackernews.com
Reported 16 April 2024, OpenJS and OpenSSF described a suspicious series of emails from different names pressing for maintainer access despite little prior involvement. They said two other popular JavaScript projects received similar approaches, and compared the pattern to the recently disclosed xz Utils social-engineering campaign.
If you maintain anything with outside contributors, write down how privileges are granted before someone charming asks for them. The pattern to watch is social pressure plus urgency plus no track record.
- notable glibc
An out-of-bounds write in glibc iconv becomes a PHP exploitation route — sourceware.org
GLIBC-SA-2024-0004, announced 17 April 2024, covers CVE-2024-2961: the ISO-2022-CN-EXT converter in iconv() can write up to four bytes past the end of a buffer, potentially crashing an application or overwriting adjacent memory. PHP's 24 April 2024 statement says this overflow is exploitable through PHP's iconv functions or filters when the application passes user-supplied character sets; the bug is in glibc, not in PHP.
Apply your distribution's glibc update across origins and base images. PHP says you do not need a PHP update once glibc is patched, and that applications are not vulnerable if they do not pass user-supplied character sets to iconv.
- notable PyPI
PyPI extends Trusted Publishing beyond GitHub Actions — blog.pypi.org
Announced 17 April 2024, PyPI's Trusted Publishing — which exchanges a short-lived OpenID Connect identity for an upload token instead of using a long-lived API key — was extended to additional CI providers beyond GitHub Actions.
If you publish Python packages from GitLab CI/CD, Google Cloud or ActiveState, this is the point at which you can delete the long-lived API token from your secrets store.
Languages, runtimes and frameworks
Sections- notable Rust
Command injection in Rust's standard library on Windows, rated critical — blog.rust-lang.org
Disclosed 9 April 2024, CVE-2024-24576 is rated critical by the Rust project for anyone invoking batch files on Windows with untrusted arguments. Rust's Command API did not correctly escape arguments when invoking batch files on Windows, so an attacker who controlled an argument could execute arbitrary shell commands. Fixed in Rust 1.77.2. Only Windows is affected, and only where batch files are invoked.
Update to Rust 1.77.2 or later if any Windows build or tool invokes .bat or .cmd files with untrusted arguments. CERT/CC lists the same Windows argument-escaping problem in other languages, including Node.js, PHP and Haskell, so check beyond Rust.
- notable PHP
PHP's April security cycle patches all three supported branches — php.net
PHP 8.3.6, 8.2.18 and 8.1.28 shipped on 11 April 2024 as security releases addressing four CVEs. They include CVE-2024-1874, a command injection through proc_open() on Windows that works even with bypass_shell enabled, which PHP rates critical.
Patch PHP across Drupal and WordPress origins.
Update, June 2024: PHP 8.3.8, 8.2.20 and 8.1.29 fixed CVE-2024-5585, a bypass of the April proc_open() fix on Windows, so April patching alone is not enough.
- notable Node.js
Node.js 22 released with require of ESM behind a flag — nodejs.org
Released 24 April 2024, Node.js 22 brought the ability to require() ES modules behind an experimental flag, a WebSocket client enabled by default, watch mode reaching stability and V8 12.4 with WebAssembly garbage collection. The Node.js project says Node.js 22 will enter long-term support in October.
Plan the move from Node 18, which the Node.js project says goes end of life in April 2025.
Static site and web tooling
Sections- notable Next.js
Next.js 14.2 cuts build memory and moves Turbopack dev to release candidate — nextjs.org
Released 11 April 2024, Next.js 14.2 brought Turbopack for development to release candidate quality, substantial reductions in build memory use, faster CSS handling and improvements to tree shaking and the App Router cache. Build-time memory had been a recurring failure mode on constrained CI runners.
If large builds have been failing on memory in CI, retest on 14.2 before increasing runner size. Treat Turbopack dev as a development-only choice still.
- fyi Astro
Astro 4.6 adds experimental CSRF protection and manual i18n routing — astro.build
Released 11 April 2024, Astro 4.6 introduced experimental CSRF protection via a check of the origin header on each incoming request, manual i18n routing for teams needing full control over locale resolution, and a set of smaller developer-experience changes.
Try the origin check on on-demand / SSR Astro pages that accept form posts. It was still experimental in 4.6 (
experimental.security.csrfProtection.origin).
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