Trying to Find a Bug in WordPress

I stumbled over some WordPress code involving caching. Immediately I had this idea about MD5 collision and how this could affect the implemented logic. I started going down a rabbit hole exploring the feasibility and eventually setting up a PHP debug environment. Only to realize that the idea was flawed from the start. So while this ends up being failed security research, we still learn a lot along the process.

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get_page_by_path: https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/get_page_by_path/
Hash Collision Overview: https://github.com/corkami/collisions#fastcoll-md5
MD5 Collision Demo: https://www.mscs.dal.ca/~selinger/md5collision/
Is there an ASCII only MD5 hash collision? https://twitter.com/LiveOverflow/status/1664280653519810563
Wordpress docker image with xdebug: https://github.com/wpdiaries/wordpress-xdebug
Debugging wordpress with xdebug: https://www.wpdiaries.com/wordpress-with-xdebug-for-docker/

What is a Server? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXmvM2QtuMU

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Chapters:
00:00 – Intro
00:36 – Finding the Research Topic
03:03 – Dumb Ideas Are NOT a Problem
03:40 – “What happens with a MD5 Hash Collision?”
04:38 – MD5 Hash Collision Feasibility
09:25 – WordPress Development Environment
11:18 – Debugging PHP
12:57 – Configuring xdebug
14:42 – Realizing the Research Idea was Flawed
15:58 – What we learned from the failed research
17:10 – hextree.io
17:47 – Outro

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