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by capableweb 1120 days ago
> No explanation for what vulnerabilities standard Drupal is actually being hardened against.

But... Are you not afraid of these unknown, not-yet-public vulnerabilities that this solution clearly protects us against?!

2 comments

> But... Are you not afraid of these unknown, not-yet-public vulnerabilities that this solution clearly protects us against?!

No, not really. First of all, a heavy disclaimer: I am speaking as a rather cynical, old, downright ancient PHP developer and not in any other capability. Not as a former Drupal security team lead, not as a developer for whatever clients I have, just plain old me.

The biggest threat in my opinion on a properly hosted Drupal is information disclosure and privilege escalation within that Drupal instance. Arbitrary code execution is utterly pointless because the user that runs Drupal will have no privileges and there'll be nothing installed on the host, nothing to run anyways. And guess what, none of that benefits from this WASM sorcery. SQL injection and XSS -- and potentially allowing private files to be downloaded -- is the real problem while this protects from arbitrary code execution.

yes, I think it seems to focus on rce vulnerabilities which in drupal are relatively rare. But also it seems almost like a research project or a work in progress, hence may not be immediately ready for prod? with that said, would be nice if both these things were stated upfront to set the expectations correctly. Like, add "experimental" to the title maybe.
it's not only that rce vulnerabilities are rare, I contend they hardly matter. You should not have anything in your php containers an RCE can run.
(Wasm Labs dev :)) For me, this is the key point. The end goal is to limit the attack surface for future vulnerabilities. This is not something specific to Drupal or PHP, but an example about technologies / apps that can take advantage of Wasm.
Don't disagree - but if I have a limited amount of resources to harden my Drupal server, it might be best to start looking at hardening around the most commonly exploited Drupal vulnerabilities.

Having said that, searching Druapl on the CISA know exploited list shows a number of remote code execution vulnerabilities that this would help mitigate: https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog

Indeed! As an example, SA-CORE-2020-013 can be mitigated with Wasm. An that one is classified as Critical.