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Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years

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Re: Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years

#71

Post by embedding-shape »

amelius wrote: post #65
boplicity wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lesson here shouldn't be that Claude Code is useless, but that it's a powerful tool in the hands of the right people.

Unfortunately, also in the hands of the __wrong__ people. Maybe even more so, because who is going to wade through all those false positives? A bad actor is maybe more likely to do that.

> A bad actor is maybe more likely to do that.

Do something about that then, so white-hat hackers are more likely than black-hat hackers to wanting to wade through that, incentives and all that jazz.

Re: Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years

#72

Post by sph »

mavamaarten wrote: post #64
boplicity wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lesson here shouldn't be that Claude Code is useless, but that it's a powerful tool in the hands of the right people.

I'm growing allergic to the hype train and the slop. I've watched real-life talks about people that sent some prompt to Claude Code and then proudly present something mediocre that they didn't make themselves to a whole audience as if they'd invented the warm water, and that just makes me weary. But at the same time, it has transformed my work from writing everything bit of code myself, to me writing the cool and com…

> it has transformed my work […] to me writing the cool and complex things

> it's amazingly capable at that.

> It _is_ a hugely powerful tool

Damn, that’s what you call being allergic to the hype train? This type of hypocritical thinly-veiled praise is what is actually unbearable with AI discourse.

Re: Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years

#73

Post by alsanan2 »

making public that AI is able of founding that kind of vulnerabilities is a big problem. In this case it's nice that the vulnerability has been closed before publishing but in case a cracker founds it, the result would be extremately different. This kind of news only open eyes for the crackers.

Re: Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years

#75

Post by kasey_junk »

skeledrew wrote: post #70
cesaref wrote: post #54

I'm interested in the implications for the open source movement, specifically about security concerns. Anyone know is there has been a study about how well Claude Code works on closed source (but decompiled) source?

> Claude Code works on closed source (but decompiled) source Very likely not nearly as well, unless there are many open source libraries in use and/or the language+patterns used are extremely popular. The really huge win for something like the Linux kernel and other popular OSS is that the source appears in the training data, a lot. And many versions. So providing the source again and saying "find X" is primarily bri…

I’m not a security researcher, but I know a few and I think universally they’d disagree with this take.

The llms know about every previous disclosed security vulnerability class and can use that to pattern match. And they can do it against compiled and in some cases obfuscated code as easily as source.

I think the security engineers out there are terrified that the balance of power has shifted too far to the finding of closed source vulnerabilities because getting patches deployed will still take so long. Not that the llms are in some way hampered by novel code bases.

Re: Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years

#76

Post by goalieca »

jason1cho wrote: post #25

This isn't surprising. What is not mentioned is that Claude Code also found one thousand false positive bugs, which developers spent three months to rule out.

Static/Dynamic analysis tools find vulnerabilities all the time. Almost all projects of a certain size have a large backlog of known issues from these boring scanners. The issue is sorting through them all and triaging them. There's too many issues to fix and figuring out which are exploitable and actually damaging, given mitigations, is time consuming.

Am i impressed claude found an old bug? Sort of.. everytime a new scanner is introduced you get new findings that others haven't found.

Re: Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years

#77

Post by pjmlp »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #18
userbinator wrote: post #17

Not "hidden", but probably more like "no one bothered to look". declares a 1024-byte owner ID, which is an unusually long but legal value for the owner ID. When I'm designing protocols or writing code with variable-length elements, "what is the valid range of lengths?" is always at the front of my mind. it uses a memory buffer that’s only 112 bytes. The denial message includes the owner ID, which can be up to 1024 by…

> This is something a lot of static analysers can easily find. And yet they didn't (either noone ran them, or they didn't find it, or they did find it but it was buried in hundreds of false positives) for 20+ years... I find it funny that every time someone does something cool with LLMs, there's a bunch of takes like this: it was trivial, it's just not important, my dad could have done that in his sleep.

Most likely no-one runned them, given the developer culture.

Re: Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years

#78

Post by otterley »

lebovic wrote: post #8
KetoManx64 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tokens are insanely cheap at the moment. Through OpenRouter a message to Sonnet costs about $0.001 cents or using Devstral 2512 it's about $0.0001. An extended coding session/feature expansion will cost me about $5 in credits. Split up your codebase so you don't have to feed all of it into the LLM at once and it's a very reasonable.

It cost me ~$750 to find a tricky privilege escalation bug in a complex codebase where I knew the rough specs but didn't have the exploit. There are certainly still many other bugs like that in the codebase, and it would cost $100k-$1MM to explore the rest of the system that deeply with models at or above the capability of Opus 4.6. It's definitely possible to do a basic pass for much less (I do this with autopen.dev…

How much would it have cost a human to do the same work? The question isn’t how much tokens cost; the question is how much money is saved by using AI to do it.

Re: Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years

#79

Post by petesergeant »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #67
mattbee wrote: post #57

Pasting a big batch of new code and asking Claude "what have I forgotten? Where are the bugs?" is a very persuasive on-ramp for developers new to AI. It spots threading & distributed system bugs that would have taken hours to uncover before, and where there isn't any other easy tooling. I bet there's loads of cryptocurrency implementations being pored over right now - actual money on the table.

> Pasting a big batch of new code and asking Claude "what have I forgotten? Where are the bugs?" It's actually the main way I use CC/codex.

I find Codex sufficiently better for it that I’ve taught Claude how to shell out to it for code reviews
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