UAIX Locale Router 3.76.0 hardening report

Full report

On this page

Primary outage drivers found

1. Embedded front-door recovery/health guard

• Registered a shutdown handler.
• Could render public 503 recovery pages after fatal errors.
• Exposed a public diagnostic REST endpoint.
• Included recovery flows capable of deleting rewrite rules, disabling plugins, or switching themes through flags.
• Removed from the package.

1. Frontend self-repair and loopbacks

• Public requests could trigger localized-home loopback checks and .htaccess repair logic.
• This can convert a routing problem or slow loopback into visitor-facing instability.
• Converted these methods to explicit no-ops and constrained diagnostics to admin/Site Health flows.

1. Runtime mutation of WordPress state

• Install/upgrade work was registered on public init.
• The plugin could mutate the active_plugins option to force itself to the front of the load order.
• Moved install/upgrade work to admin_init and removed active-plugin-order mutation.

1. Custom .htaccess architecture

• The plugin wrote custom UAIX marker blocks and refreshed WordPress marker blocks.
• This is fragile on shared hosting, multisite, proxy/CDN, and non-Apache stacks.
• Replaced with standard WordPress rewrite refresh and legacy-marker removal through an authenticated admin action only.

1. Hot-path filesystem scans

• Translation fallback could scan active theme/plugin source files on cold frontend requests.
• Dictionary cache fingerprints used full-file hashing.
• Frontend now reads prepared runtime dictionaries, avoids source scans, and uses cheap file-stat fingerprints.

Hardening changes made

• Bumped plugin version and readme stable tag to 3.76.0.
• Removed includes/site-health-guard.php from the package.
• Removed top-level inclusion of the health guard.
• Changed default new-install routing state to disabled.
• Changed new-install redirect default to 302.
• Restricted install/upgrade tasks to admin execution.
• Removed active plugin load-order mutation.
• Made frontend handoff self-healing an explicit no-op.
• Rewrote .htaccess management to rely on the standard WordPress block.
• Added legacy UAIX .htaccess marker detection/removal.
• Converted the general repair tool to use a soft rewrite cache refresh.
• Added fallback handling for failed preg_replace_callback() calls.
• Prevented content token rendering when plugin routing is disabled.
• Stopped public bootstrap-failure paths from writing options on every frontend request.
• Stored uploaded dictionaries in runtime-key format so frontend reads do not scan source files.
• Added an admin upgrade migration for existing source-text dictionaries.
• Added stricter upload error and post-read size checks for dictionary JSON files.
• Added a hardening notes document in docs/HARDENING.md.

Validation performed

• PHP syntax linted every PHP file in the plugin.
• Verified the release ZIP does not include the removed health guard, includes/, vendor/, node_modules/, .git, tests, or runtime log folders.
• Verified package version alignment between the main plugin header, UAIXLR_VERSION, Composer metadata, and readme.txt stable tag.

Remaining release caveats

• I did not run a full WordPress integration test matrix inside this environment.
• I did not raise Tested up to beyond the original value because that should only be done after a real WordPress-version compatibility pass.
• Before marketplace submission, run WordPress Plugin Check and PHPCS/WPCS in CI against the target WordPress/PHP matrix.