The folks over at RIPSTech, a PHP-focused security company, have posted the announcement about the latest edition of their PHP Security Advent Calendar. This is the third year they've done this and it's always interesting and fun to find out about some of the vulnerabilities that can lie hidden in everyday PHP code.

The holiday season is coming up again and it’s time for some security fun. For the third time in a row, we are proud to announce our PHP security advent calendar. This year, we will analyze 24 exciting security bugs that we detected in the most widespread WordPress plugins.

In our first calendar edition in 2016, we analyzed exceptional vulnerabilities in some of the most popular open source PHP applications. Last year, we released 24 PHP security challenges with a hidden security pitfall in every day’s code challenge. This year we would like to give once again something back to the great PHP and Infosec community and release another advent calendar with 24 security surprises.

While you can't start on the calendar just yet (as of this post it's only November 28th) it will be coming soon. Be sure to sign up for their newsletter to get updates on when it's officially launched.

On their blog, RIPS Technologies have shared a wrap-up of their security advent calendar shared at the end of last year. The calendar provided a daily challenge related to a PHP security issue that may or may not be commonly known.

In this years PHP Security Advent Calendar we published 24 challenges for the PHP community where security issues were hidden in code snippets for fun and training. The challenges are based on real-world security vulnerabilities that we found with the help of RIPS over the last year in popular PHP applications. In this blog post we are going to discuss the main take-aways from our advent calendar regarding PHP security.

The calendar covered several different types of challenges but they fell into a few overall categories: issues with user input, weak typing, odd behavior of built-in features and the overall diversity of possible bugs.

The root cause for the security issues presented in our challenges are not new. But the diversity and combination of these pitfalls are sheer endless that trick even skilled developers. What looks secure at first sight quickly turns into an exploitable security bug. [...] We would like to thank everyone who participated, discussed, and provided great feedback and we hope our challenges helped in sharpening your security skills in a fun way!

The RIPSTech group has a post to their site with the announcement of the return of their security-related advent calendar. This year, however, it comes in the form of the PHP Security Advent Calendar with more of a "common security problems in PHP" approach than a list of vulnerabilities.

The end of the year is coming closer and the cheery advent time begins. We are looking back at a spectacular year and it is time to thank and give back to the great PHP, infosec, and RIPS community. Thank you for developing, auditing, and securing your PHP applications with us in 2017!

Similar to last years advent of PHP application vulnerabilities where we released a new application vulnerability each day, we will release a new calendar gift from December 1st to 24th this year again. This time, we will focus on nifty PHP pitfalls and release a daily code challenge for you to solve. Can you spot the daily security bug?

As today is December 1st, the first item has been posted to the calendar covering the use of whitelists versus blacklists. Keep checking back daily for new updates to the calendar and the daily code challenges.