Radar · 2024-09
September 2024
Chained CUPS flaws give remote code execution on Linux print systems, a signature-verification flaw in ruby-saml allows full authentication bypass, WordPress.org cuts a major host off from the update servers, Australia publishes its Voluntary AI Safety Standard alongside consultation on mandatory guardrails and the whole-of-government AI policy takes effect.
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- critical DTA
The whole-of-government AI policy takes effect — itnews.com.au
The DTA's policy for the responsible use of AI in government took effect on 1 September 2024. It is mandatory for non-corporate Commonwealth entities and does not apply to the defence portfolio or the national intelligence community. Agencies must designate an accountable official for AI by 30 November 2024 and publish an AI transparency statement by 28 February 2025, reviewed annually.
Check whether the agency you are building for has published its transparency statement, and confirm that any AI feature you ship — semantic search, retrieval, summarisation — is covered by it.
- fyi OpenAI
o1-preview starts the reasoning-model category — openai.com
Released 12 September 2024, o1-preview and o1-mini are trained to spend more time thinking through problems before they respond. Launch limits were 30 messages per week for o1-preview and 50 for o1-mini on paid ChatGPT tiers, and 20 requests per minute for top-tier API users; the ChatGPT limits were raised on 17 September to 50 a week for o1-preview and 50 a day for o1-mini. OpenAI said its next model update, then in development, scored 83 per cent on an International Mathematics Olympiad qualifying exam, against 13 per cent for GPT-4o.
Nothing actionable yet — the rate limits make production use impractical.
- fyi Anthropic
Prefixing chunks with context cuts retrieval failures by half — anthropic.com
Published 19 September 2024, Anthropic's contextual retrieval technique uses a model to prepend chunk-specific explanatory context to each chunk before embedding, alongside a contextual BM25 index. Reported top-20 retrieval failure rates fall from 5.7 per cent to 3.7 per cent with contextual embeddings alone, to 2.9 per cent combined with contextual BM25, and to 1.9 per cent with reranking added.
If you run a vector index over CMS content, evaluate contextual chunk prefixing against your current chunker before reaching for a reranker. It is a cheap preprocessing change with published numbers, not a product to buy.
Security and edge
Sections- notable CUPS
Chained CUPS flaws give remote code execution on Linux print systems — openprinting.github.io
Disclosed 26 September 2024 and summarised by OpenPrinting on the 29th, four chained flaws culminate in remote code execution: CVE-2024-47176, where cups-browsed binds UDP port 631 and accepts packets from any source, causing it to fetch an IPP resource from an attacker-controlled URL; CVE-2024-47076 and CVE-2024-47175, failures to validate and sanitise IPP attributes; and CVE-2024-47177, arbitrary command execution via a Foomatic directive. A fifth covers denial-of-service amplification.
Inventory hosts running cups-browsed — it is separate from CUPS itself and usually unnecessary on servers — then disable it or restrict its browse protocols, and patch the affected packages. Print services are routinely forgotten in server hardening baselines.
- notable ASD
ASD publishes Active Directory compromise guidance with international partners — cyber.gov.au
Published 26 September 2024 with international partners, the guidance covers the seventeen most prevalent techniques used to compromise Active Directory, with detection and mitigation for each. CISA's resource page names ASD's ACSC with CISA, NSA, CCCS, NCSC-UK and NCSC-NZ.
Map the seventeen techniques against your AD monitoring and hardening posture, paying particular attention to service accounts used by CMS or deployment tooling. Active Directory is the identity substrate behind most Australian government CMS and intranet estates, and this is the ASD-authored baseline the agency's security team will be measured against.
- fyi Chrome
Chrome 129 fixes a V8 type confusion and a downloads security-UI bug — chromereleases.googleblog.com
Chrome 129.0.6668.58 and .59, released 17 September 2024, shipped ten security fixes, six of them with assigned CVEs at publication, headlined by CVE-2024-8904, a high-severity type confusion in V8, plus medium-severity issues in V8, the omnibox and the downloads security UI.
Confirm managed fleets are past 129.0.6668.58. Nothing site-side to change — and unlike August, none of these was reported as exploited.
Standards and compliance
Sections- notable AI policy
Australia publishes a Voluntary AI Safety Standard and consults on mandatory guardrails — industry.gov.au
On 5 September 2024 the industry department published the Voluntary AI Safety Standard — ten voluntary guardrails applying to all organisations across the AI supply chain. The department opened consultation the same day on a proposals paper for mandatory guardrails in high-risk settings, with a proposed high-risk definition, ten proposed regulatory guardrails, and options to mandate them. Consultation closed 4 October 2024.
Read the ten voluntary guardrails and map them onto your own AI service documentation. The department says the first nine are aligned closely with the proposed mandatory guardrails.
- fyi Privacy
The first tranche of Privacy Act reform reaches Parliament — aph.gov.au
The Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024 was introduced and read a first time on 12 September 2024, carrying a tiered civil penalty framework, a Children's Online Privacy Code, and a statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy.
Flag to clients that a statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy was on the table from this date, and start inventorying children's-audience properties. The Children's Code and the tort together change the risk calculus for any government site collecting personal information from minors or running third-party analytics.
Update, November 2024: The Bill passed the House on 6 November and the Senate on 28 November 2024 with 35 Government amendments, which the House accepted on 29 November.
Update, December 2024: It received assent on 10 December 2024.
- fyi IETF
RFC 9651 replaces RFC 8941 for HTTP structured fields — rfc-editor.org
Published 30 September 2024 as a Proposed Standard, RFC 9651 defines the data types and parsing and serialisation algorithms for structured HTTP header and trailer fields, obsoleting RFC 8941 and adding Date and Display String types.
If your edge code or documentation references RFC 8941, update it to 9651. Structured fields are the substrate for modern header work at the edge — cache directives, client hints, signatures — so anyone writing edge functions that parse or emit headers should be coding to the current document.
CMS and platforms
Sections- critical WordPress
WordPress.org cuts a major host off from the update servers — wordpress.org
On 25 September 2024 wordpress.org announced WP Engine no longer had free access to its resources, saying that if WP Engine wanted to control its customers' WordPress experience it would need to run its own login system, update servers, plugin and theme directories, pattern and block directories, translations and photo directory, among other services. Affected customers were directed to WP Engine support. On 27 September it lifted the block until 1 October. A 21 September post on the same site, titled "WP Engine is not WordPress", attacked WP Engine over disabling post revisions by default.
For any WordPress property on that host, verify plugin and theme update paths independently of wordpress.org. More broadly, treat "who controls the update channel" as a documented risk in platform selection — this is the month a single vendor dispute broke automatic plugin, theme and translation updates for sites on a major host.
- fyi Drupal
Drupal CMS announced at DrupalCon Barcelona for January 2025 — drupal.org
In the Driesnote at DrupalCon Barcelona on 25 September 2024, Drupal CMS was unveiled: a packaged, no-code-oriented distribution built on Drupal core with Experience Builder, targeting release on 15 January 2025. Announced AI capabilities included AI-assisted site migration, automated image alt text, and agents that assist with content editing, field setup and taxonomy creation.
Plan a January 2025 evaluation, and decide now how AI-assisted authoring features would sit against the AI transparency requirements that took effect this month — an agent that writes taxonomy or alt text is an AI use inside the agency's disclosure perimeter.
Supply chain, CI/CD and IaC
Sections- critical SAML
A signature-verification flaw in ruby-saml allows full authentication bypass — cert.europa.eu
CERT-EU's 19 September 2024 advisory says GitLab issued a security advisory on 17 September for CVE-2024-45409, CVSS 10, from improper validation of SAML assertions, and that GitLab fixed it by upgrading OmniAuth-SAML to 2.2.1 and Ruby-SAML to 1.17.0. The ruby-saml GHSA, published 10 September 2024, describes an incorrect XPath selector so an attacker holding any signed SAML document from the identity provider can forge a response, and lists patched versions 1.17.0 and 1.12.3.
Confirm self-managed GitLab is at or past the patched versions CERT-EU lists, and that ruby-saml is 1.17.0 or 1.12.3 or later anywhere else in your stack, then review SSO sign-in logs for the disclosure window.
- critical PyPI
Deleted PyPI package names can be re-registered by anyone — thehackernews.com
Research published 4 September 2024 showed PyPI allows a deleted project's name to be re-registered by a different account, so an attacker can claim an abandoned name, publish a higher version number, and have it install as an update to what developers believe is the original package. Roughly 22,000 removed packages were assessed as at risk, with around 309 packages removed monthly and the at-risk set including packages with more than 100,000 downloads. The technique had already been used in the wild.
Pin Python dependencies with hashes, and audit requirements files for packages whose upstream project has been deleted from PyPI. This is a registry-design gap rather than a single malicious package, so any build resolving an unpinned or loosely pinned dependency inherits it.
- notable GitHub
Actions cache v1 and v2 get a retirement date, and webhooks a rate limit — github.blog
Announced 16 September 2024: incoming webhook events would be rate-limited to 1,250 requests per ten seconds per repository from 1 October 2024, and actions/cache v1 and v2 would begin deprecation on 1 February 2025 and be fully retired on 1 March, with awareness brownouts through February. The migration path is v3 or v4; Enterprise Server was unaffected.
Grep workflows for actions/cache pinned to v1 or v2 and bump to v4, and check any webhook-triggered deploy path against the new ceiling.
Languages, runtimes and frameworks
Sections- notable PHP
PHP patches a bypass of June's PHP-CGI fix — php.net
The security releases of 26 September 2024 — 8.3.12, 8.2.24 and 8.1.30 — fix four CVEs. CVE-2024-8926 bypasses the earlier CVE-2024-4577 fix on Windows under a non-standard code page configuration, allowing parameter injection into php-cgi. CVE-2024-8927 lets a
Redirect-Statusrequest header set HTTP_REDIRECT_STATUS, bypassing cgi.force_redirect; in some configurations this allows arbitrary file inclusion. CVE-2024-9026 lets PHP-FPM child processes alter logs. CVE-2024-8925 is erroneous multipart form-data parsing that can leave legitimate data unprocessed.Patch all three branches. If you run PHP-CGI on Windows, check for the non-standard code page configuration the CVE-2024-4577 bypass depends on, and audit any multipart form endpoint — the parsing bug can drop legitimate fields without raising an error.
- notable Go
Go patches three stack-exhaustion panics — groups.google.com
Go 1.23.1 and 1.22.7, released 5 September 2024, fix CVE-2024-34155 in go/parser, CVE-2024-34156 in encoding/gob and CVE-2024-34158 in go/build/constraint. All three are unrecoverable panics on deeply nested input rather than memory corruption.
Move to 1.23.1 or 1.22.7 and rebuild, then review any code path that gob-decodes external input — decoding untrusted data with encoding/gob is the realistic exposure, and any Go service including edge tooling and build utilities that does so can be crashed.
- notable Python
Python 3.8 gets what may be its last release before end of life — python.org
The 6–7 September 2024 batch covered six trains: 3.13.0rc2, 3.12.6, 3.11.10, 3.10.15, 3.9.20 and 3.8.20. 3.8.20 is the security release for the legacy 3.8 series. Python 3.12.6 carried around 90 bug fixes plus security content: libexpat upgraded to 2.6.3 covering four CVEs, quadratic-complexity cookie parsing in http.cookies, tarfile header backtracking, infinite loops in zipfile.Path and hardened email address parsing.
Patch to your branch's September release, then inventory any Python 3.8 workloads and plan migration — 3.8 security releases run only until October 2024, and it is common in older government tooling and container base images.
Update, October 2024: Python 3.8 reached end of life on 7 October 2024, and 3.8.20 was its final security release.
Static site and web tooling
Sections- notable Vite
Vite patches a file-read bypass and a build-output XSS gadget — github.com
Disclosed 17 September 2024, CVE-2024-45811 bypasses server.fs.deny using import and raw query parameters to return arbitrary file contents to the browser. CVE-2024-45812 is a DOM-clobbering gadget in bundles built to cjs, iife or umd formats, letting an attacker who can inject scriptless HTML shadow document.currentScript and redirect script imports for XSS. Both are fixed in 5.4.6, 5.3.6, 5.2.14, 5.1.8, 4.5.4 and 3.2.11.
Upgrade on your major line, and confirm no dev server is network-reachable. The second flaw is the one that matters more here: it is a build-output problem that ships to production for anyone emitting UMD or IIFE bundles, not just a dev-server issue.
- notable Next.js
A crafted request poisons the CDN cache in front of Next.js — nvd.nist.gov
CVE-2024-46982, disclosed 17 September 2024 at CVSS 7.5, lets a crafted HTTP request cause Next.js to cache a route intended to be uncached and emit a stale-while-revalidate cache header, which an upstream CDN may then also cache. It requires Next.js 13.5.1 to 14.2.9, the pages router, and a non-dynamic server-side-rendered route. Fixed in 13.5.7 and 14.2.10, with no workaround.
Upgrade regardless of whether you can reproduce it. If you front Next.js with a CDN, review whether you honour origin s-maxage unconditionally — the impact lands on the cache layer, not the origin, so a poisoned entry propagates to every visitor behind it.
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