The React2Shell Story
153 points by mufeedvh 19 hours ago | 10 comments

Rauchg 10 hours ago
R2S was a painful one, but Lachlan was a dream of a security researcher to partner with. Not just from a responsible disclosure POV, but things like hopping on multiple calls with Meta and our team to help us validate remediations. Thank you Lachlan for helping make the internet safer (and great job on figuring out this 'labyrinth' of a vulnerability)
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owebmaster 17 minutes ago
You ruined React.

But it was quite profitable for you.

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halflife 10 minutes ago
React was ruined from the moment they abandoned class components and introduced hooks. Vercel is just continuing the trend of hype against common sense.
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ascorbic 2 hours ago
A great read. Sylvie's writeup is good too: https://sylvie.fyi/posts/react2shell/
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mnahkies 4 hours ago
I was really surprised when this hit, and I discovered the protocol was essentially undocumented / unspecified. I was trying to find indicators of compromise and that was made more difficult by the lack of documentation.

It was really helpful that they had coordinated with WAF providers like cloud flare ahead of disclosure to put rules in place though.

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sam1r 10 hours ago
>> Amazingly, despite being a weekend, the Meta team triaged, reproduced, and confirmed my submission in around 17 hours.

Incredible. Realize what you have done from start to finish (with confirmation) in < 24 hours.

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keyle 11 hours ago
Nice read!

I love the "we are so back" vs. "it's so over" graph. Defines so much of this type of work. "Wow? ... nah... WOW?! ... nah..."

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simonreiff 10 hours ago
What a great write-up. Thanks for sharing how you found this fascinating vulnerability and exploit.
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halflife 4 hours ago
Whoda thunkit that

- blurring the lines between client code and server code

- creating a brand new protocol for communication between trusted and untrusted actors

- and with all of that allow the protocol to serialize code and not just primitives

Would be a tremendously stupid idea. And for what? To lock developers further into the react ecosystem. What a shitshow react continues to be.

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phyzome 9 hours ago
Haha, nice.

One correction: The link in "To be honest, I'm not even sure if I understand it, but it's on my GitHub." goes to the wrong file (01 instead of 00).

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