Guyub – Konsultan F/OSS

Three years ago the Hardened-PHP project organized the Month of PHP Bugs. During one month I disclosed more than 40 vulnerabilities in the PHP interpreter in order to improve the overall security of PHP. In the history of PHP this event has been one of a kind. But now, three years later, my company SektionEins GmbH will continue in the same spirit and organize the Month of PHP Security. Our preparations are not finished yet, but here is a sneak preview of what it will be.

The Month of PHP Security will take place in May 2010 and will be very different from all the previews ?Month of Bugs? or ?Week of Bugs? events. You can think of the Month of PHP Security as a conference without a conference. This means around the 1st of March we will send out a call for papers in order to collect the best advisories, the best research and the best articles about PHP security. We invite everyone from the PHP and from the security community to take part in this event.

The basic idea will be that during May we are planning to release (at least) one advisory or one research paper or one article about PHP security topics that were submitted to the public. And in the end of May our jury will select the best X submissions and give out prizes. We are still in the process of selecting good prizes and would be happy about more sponsors. Therefore: If you consider this event to be a good idea to improve the security of PHP and want to sponsor prizes, do not hesitate to contact us at info@sektioneins.de.

The accepted topics will be:

• Advisory/Article about new vulnerability in PHP (with or without exploits) (no simple safe_mode, open_basedir bypass vulnerabilities)
• Advisory/Article about vulnerability in PHP related software (popular 3rd party PHP extensions/patches, like Suhosin or Zend tools)
• Detailed article about a single topic of PHP application security
• Article about a complicated vulnerability in/attack against a widespread PHP application
• Article about a complicated topic of attacking PHP (e.g. explain how to exploit heap overflows in PHP?s heap implementation)
• Article about how to attack encrypted PHP applications
• Release of a new PHP security tools
• Other topics related to PHP (application) security

Of course we will accept multiple submissions by the same person/team and there will most probably also be articles/advisories by ourself. (But of course we cannot win the prizes)

We at SektionEins are already very excited about the event and hope it will be a success and once again improve the security of the PHP ecosystem.