babalicious

I'll be the first to admit I'm mediocre at exploit development, but I am in contact with enough extremely talented exploit developers to say this for certain: Anyone claiming they were "easily" able to generate a working php2shell exploit with AI is either: a) a world-class exploit developer with an extreme case of imposter syndrome. b) currently looking at some very confident-sounding but wrong LLM output. I'm rather certain it's the latter based on the number of AI-hallucinated exploits I've seen posted on GitHub. Threat actors are also blasting my honeypot network with "php2shell" exploits that not only don't work, but aren't even within 10,000 miles of anything to do with how the exploit actually works. I've seen the same technique from the attached image in multiple alleged "php2shell exploits", including one on GitHub with over 100 stars. Problem is, it's not php2shell, nor is it even a vulnerability at all. It's a technique known as "session poisoning", which can be leveraged to exploit local file inclusion (LFI) vulnerabilities in PHP apps (not PHP itself). The only thing it has in common with CVE-2026-109618/CVE-2026-109619 is they both use the "PHP_SESSION_UPLOAD_PROGRESS" feature. And mitigation advice for both issues reference setting "session.upload_progress.enabled" to "Off". People are shoving loose details of the vulnerability into LLMs, the LLMs are keying in on the "PHP_SESSION_UPLOAD_PROGRESS" string, then generating session poisoning code that has nothing to do with the actual CVE. And because the people doing this have absolutely no idea what they're doing, they're confident enough to post their "proof of concept exploit" to GitHub and share it on social media. So if you see people talking about "session poisoning + LFI" it's likely their LLM hallucinated an exploit based on a 2018 blog by Orange Tsai talking about a local file inclusion attack vector. What's even worse is that "security researchers" are then using LLMs to triage these exploitation attempts, falling victim to the same hallucinations, then confirming there is ongoing mass-exploitation (there currently isn't). The actual real exploit is very difficult to exploit, and so far I've not seen anyone successfully get it working on more than a handful of PHP version with highly-specific configurations. LLMs are useful tools in the hands of skilled professionals, but for others, they're often just a Dunning-Kruger accelerator.

Ordinals survived the 2023 spam war. You know that part. What almost nobody knows: a weird little protocol made that war impossible to win for the filter side. Bitcoin STAMPS. The unsung hero of the whole story 🧵

PIPEs, Witness Encryption & the Future of Privacy on Bitcoin | with Misha Komarov and Clara Shikhelman 🔗 YouTube: youtu.be/eMIZFFfU3PI Today, @allocinitxyz co-founder @nemothenoone and Head of Protocol Research @ClaraShik join me to unpack PIPEs — a framework that could potentially make binary covenants possible on Bitcoin without the need for a soft fork, enabling truly trustless bridges amongst other expressive functionality. Leveraging advancements in Witness Encryption — one of the most cutting-edge areas of advanced theoretical cryptography — PIPEs enables the execution of Bitcoin signatures by proving correct computation (e.g. of account balances on layer 2s and metaprotocols). Although the underlying cryptographic assumptions remain experimental and unhardened, Komarov and Shikhelman believe PIPEs could deliver the functionality of covenant-enabling upgrades like OP_CAT without the need for protocol-level changes—making PIPEs one of the most significant potential developments for Bitcoin since the advent of BitVM. The team also announced their first proposed use case this morning: a privacy protocol titled "Shielded Bitcoin." In this episode, we unpack the theory and the practice of how this technology is evolving — and what the new road ahead looks like for PIPEs, Shielded Bitcoin and beyond. This episode of Bitcoin Rails is brought to you by: LayerTwo Labs @LayerTwoLabs — developing research, software, and technologies for scaling Bitcoin via the integration of Drivechains (BIP 300/301) Hashi on @SuiNetwork — a primitive for executing Bitcoin DeFi transactions, without having to trust a federated bridge or other centralized entity BitBox @BitBoxSwiss — an open-source Bitcoin-only hardware wallet, with smooth UX and no compromises on security. Check out Bitbox [dot] swiss and use code BITCOINRAILS to get a discount TIMESTAMPS: 🎙️ 01:42 Tying PIPEs to the mission at [[alloc] init] 🔓 08:31 Defining witness encryption and conditional decryption 🛠️ 23:59 Shifting from functional encryption (PIPEs v1) to witness encryption 📜 26:17 Outlining pre-covenants vs. post-covenants on Bitcoin 🏎️ 39:37 Why PIPEs v2 is far from the end of the road 🌐 56:57 Building meta-protocols and avoiding external sequencer risks 👀 1:05:00 Implementing optional compliant privacy via viewing keys ⚡ 1:15:33 Comparing PIPEs to BitVM and rendering BIPs obsolete 🎲 1:23:07 Evaluating the min-rank hardness assumption

The story of how this image started... and evolved into what is sitting on my desk is one of the more important lessons in my entire life. The 3rd Edition HARDCOVER Tune in tonight Link below 👇🏼

It'll take an endless transfer of enthusiasm to turn the tide on AI. The age of agents has been met with intense skepticism, and that's fine, that's fair. But now it's time for you to revisit your priors. Let me talk you through how I updated mine. youtube.com/watch?v=NYFGCESm…