3I/ATLAS’s , who are you? (4th Aug 2025)

Quote: Hawking advised against active attempts to contact alien civilizations, which could be dangerous, arguing that an advanced alien race could see the same bacteria as humans, which could lead to catastrophic consequences if they discovered Earth.

Ref: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11462274/

Background: 3I/ATLAS, also known as C/2025 N1 and previously as A11pl3Z, is an interstellar comet discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System station at Río Hurtado, Chile on 1 July 2025, when it was entering the inner Solar System at a distance of 4.5 astronomical units from the Sun.

Technical details: A team of researchers has presented the wild theory that an interstellar object might be hostile “alien technology” that could reach Earth in fall 2025. Below is the speculation based on evidences.

-3I/ATLAS orbital plane lies virtually in the Ecliptic, though retrogade, i = 175.11◦

-3I/ATLAS is too large to be an asteroid

-3I/ATLAS shows no evidence of cometary outgassing.

Ref: cometary outgassing provides the energy to push a comet away from the Sun. As a comet approaches the Sun, its icy nucleus warms, causing ices to sublimate and release gas and dust, forming a coma. This outgassing exerts a force on the comet, pushing it in the opposite direction of the escaping gas, which is a major factor in the comet’s trajectory.

– 3I/ATLAS approaches unusually close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter

– I/ATLAS achieves perihelion on the opposite side of the Sun to Earth

Remark: The Earth revolves around the Sun in an elliptical orbit, and its closest point to the Sun is called perihelion.

– The optimal point to do a reverse Solar Oberth and stay bound to the Sun is at perihelion.

– 3I/ATLAS’s incoming radiant made it hard to detect sooner

The incoming radiant of comet 3I/ATLAS aligning with the Galactic Center, a bright and crowded region of the sky, made it difficult to detect, according to an Instagram post. This unusual entry path, coupled with the comet’s potential “silent propulsion” (lacking typical outgassing) and close encounters with planets, contributed to its delayed detection.

Technical papers announcement: The technical paper was published on the preprint server arXiv on July 16, 2025. For more information, please refer to the link – https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12213

Yahoo headlines from July 27, 2025 https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/possibly-hostile-alien-object-could-023132776.html

CVE-2025-54574: About Squid. Stay alert! (4 Aug 2025)

NVD Published Date: 08/01/2025

NVD Last Modified: 08/01/2025

Preface: While HTTP/1.0 is largely obsolete, HTTP/1.1 remains in widespread use, despite the newer HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 protocols. Though HTTP/1.1 has been updated in recent years, its core functionality is still foundational for much of the web.

Does processing Uniform Resource Names consume memory?

Yes, processing Uniform Resource Names (URNs) can consume memory. While URNs themselves are symbolic names and don’t directly represent the resource’s location or data, they need to be processed to resolve them, which often involves memory allocation for parsing, data storage, and potential redirection handling.

Background: Squid Proxy is a caching proxy, and that’s a key aspect of how it functions. It’s not just a proxy that forwards requests; it also stores copies of frequently accessed web content locally. This caching behavior significantly speeds up subsequent requests for the same content, making it faster and more efficient than a simple forwarding proxy.

A “Trivial-HTTP response,” often abbreviated as THTTP, refers to a convention for encoding resolution service requests and responses using the HTTP/1.0 or HTTP/1.1 protocols, as defined in RFC 2169.

Squid Proxy is primarily developed using C++. While it utilizes some C language components and libraries, the dominant language in its codebase is C++.

Ref: STCB, in the context of Squid cache, refers to the StoreEntry data structure, which is a key component of how Squid caches web content in memory. It’s a relatively small amount of metadata associated with each cached object, stored in memory to speed up access and retrieval

Vulnerability details: Squid is a caching proxy for the Web. In versions 6.3 and below, Squid is vulnerable to a heap buffer overflow and possible remote code execution attack when processing URN due to incorrect buffer management. This has been fixed in version 6.4. To work around this issue, disable URN access permissions.

Official announcement: Please see the link for details –

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-54574

CVE-2025-54576: Design weakness in OAuth2-Proxy 7.10.0 and below (1 Aug 2025)

Preface: Regular Expressions are efficient in that one line of code can save you writing hundreds of lines. But they’re normally slower (even pre-compiled) than thoughtful hand written code simply due to the overhead. Generally the simpler the objective the worse Regular Expressions are. They’re better for complex operations.

Background: OAuth2 Proxy is used to add authentication to applications that don’t natively support it, acting as a reverse proxy that handles authentication using OAuth2 providers like Google, GitHub, or Okta. It simplifies the process of adding authentication to existing applications by separating the authentication logic from the application code. This allows developers to focus on building their core application logic without needing to implement complex authentication workflows.

Vulnerability details: In versions 7.10.0 and below, oauth2-proxy deployments are vulnerable when using the skip_auth_routes configuration option with regex patterns. Attackers can bypass authentication by crafting URLs with query parameters that satisfy configured regex patterns, allowing unauthorized access to protected resources. The issue stems from skip_auth_routes matching against the full request URI. Deployments using skip_auth_routes with regex patterns containing wildcards or broad matching patterns are most at risk.

Resolution: This issue is fixed in version 7.11.0

Workarounds include: auditing all skip_auth_routes configurations for overly permissive patterns, replacing wildcard patterns with exact path matches where possible, ensuring regex patterns are properly anchored (starting with ^ and ending with $), or implementing custom validation that strips query parameters before regex matching.

Official announcement: Please see the link for details https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-54576