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Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years

mtlynch.io

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

#181
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what is happening right now. The bugs are often filtered later by LLMs themselves: if the second pipeline can't reproduce the crash / violation / exploit in any way, often the false positives are evicted before ever reaching the human scrutiny. Checking if a real vulnerability can be triggered is a trivial task compared to finding one, so this second pipeline has an almost 100% success rate from the POV: i…

> Checking if a real vulnerability can be triggered is a trivial task compared to finding one Have you ever tried to write PoC for any CVE? This statement is wrong. Sometimes bug may exist but be impossible to trigger/exploit. So it is not trivial at all.

I'm tickled at the idea of asking antirez [1] if he's ever written a PoC for a CVE.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvatore_Sanfilippo

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what is happening right now. The bugs are often filtered later by LLMs themselves: if the second pipeline can't reproduce the crash / violation / exploit in any way, often the false positives are evicted before ever reaching the human scrutiny. Checking if a real vulnerability can be triggered is a trivial task compared to finding one, so this second pipeline has an almost 100% success rate from the POV: i…

I’ve been around long enough to remember people saying that VMs are useless waste of resources with dubious claims about isolation, cloud is just someone else’s computer, containers are pointless and now it’s AI. There is a astonishing amount of conservatism in the hacker scene..

Is it conservatism or just the Blub paradox?

As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.

https://paulgraham.com/avg.html

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

#183
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.

I like biasing it towards the fact that there is a bug, so it can't just say "no bugs! all good!" without looking into it very hard.

Usually I ask something like this:

"This code has a bug. Can you find it?"

Sometimes I also tell it that "the bug is non-obvious"

Which I've anecdotally found to have a higher rate of success than just asking for a spot check

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

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the cloud is someone else's computer.

It is, but that's not a useful or insightful thing to say

Are you sure about that?

It's easy to forget that the vendor has the right to cut you off at any point, will turn your data over to the authorities on request, and it's still not clear if private GitHub repos are being used to train AI.

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

#185
Interestingly, I think 3 or 4 out of the 5 bugs would have been prevented / mitigated quite well using https://github.com/anthraxx/linux-hardened patches...

(disabled io_uring, would have crashed the kernel on UAF, and made exploitation of the heap overflow very unreliable)

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

#186
post #172

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.

What is with negativity against AI in YC? Can anyone point a finger of why this anti take is so prominent? We're living through the most revolutionary moment of software since it's its inception and the main thing that gets consistently upvoted is negativity, FUD and it doesn't work in this case, or it's all slop.

> Can anyone point a finger of why this anti take is so prominent?

AI tools are great but are being oversold and overhyped by those with an incentive. So, there is a continuous drumbeat of "AI will do all the code for you" ! "Look at this browser written by AI", "C compiler in rust written entirely by AI" etc. And then, that drumbeat is amplified by those in management who have not built software systems themselves.

What happened to the AI generated "C compiler in rust" ? or the browser written by AI ? - they remain a steaming pile of almost-working code. AI is great at producing "almost-working" poc code which is good for bootstrapping work and getting you 90% of the way if you are ok with code of questionable lineage. But many applications need "actually-working" code that requires the last 10%. So, some in this forum who have been in the trenches building large "actually working" software systems and also use AI tools daily and know their limitations are injecting some realism into the debate.

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they also measuring productivity? Measuring only token costs is like looking only at grocery spend but not the full receipt: you don’t know whether you fed your family for a week or for only a day.

First you have to figure out HOW to measure productivity.

(Output / input), both of which are usually measured in money. If you can measure both of those things--and you have bigger problems if your finance department can't--it logically follows that you can measure productivity.

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

#188
post #181
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Checking if a real vulnerability can be triggered is a trivial task compared to finding one Have you ever tried to write PoC for any CVE? This statement is wrong. Sometimes bug may exist but be impossible to trigger/exploit. So it is not trivial at all.

I'm tickled at the idea of asking antirez [1] if he's ever written a PoC for a CVE. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvatore_Sanfilippo

Sure he wrote a port scanner that obscures the IP address of the scanner, but does he know anything about security? /s

Oh, and he wrote Redis. No biggie.

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

#190
post #172

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.

What is with negativity against AI in YC? Can anyone point a finger of why this anti take is so prominent? We're living through the most revolutionary moment of software since it's its inception and the main thing that gets consistently upvoted is negativity, FUD and it doesn't work in this case, or it's all slop.

Not speaking for myself but the you won’t have a job soon narrative puts people off
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