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Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found

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Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found

#131

I think they key thing here is they "isolated the relevant code" If the exploits exist in e.g. one file, great. But many complex zerodays and exploits are chains of various bugs/behaviors in complex systems. Important research but I don’t think it dispels anything about Mythos

Seems perfectly comparable to anthropic's method, they just wrapped the same kind of prompt in a for loop.

Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found

#132
The thesis that the system is more important than the model is not bitter lesson pilled. I would not bet on this in the long term. We will get to the point where you can just tell the model to go find and classify the severity of all security problems with a codebase.

Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found

#133
post #15

The Anthropic writeup addresses this explicitly: > This was the most critical vulnerability we discovered in OpenBSD with Mythos Preview after a thousand runs through our scaffold. Across a thousand runs through our scaffold, the total cost was under $20,000 and found several dozen more findings. While the specific run that found the bug above cost under $50, that number only makes sense with full hindsight. Like any…

so what you're saying is no one could ever write a loop like: for githubProject in githubProjects opencode command /findvulnerability end for Seems like a silly thing to try and back up.

What he's saying is that you should read the "Caveats and limitations" section of the article.

Here's the first one:

> Our tests gave models the vulnerable function directly, often with contextual hints (e.g., "consider wraparound behavior").

Mythos did no such thing, it was cut lose and told to find vulnerabilities. If the intent was to prove that small models are just as good, they haven't demonstrated that at all. The end.

Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found

#134

Without showing false-positive rates this analysis is useless. If your model says every line if your code has a bug, it will catch 100% of the bugs, but it's not useful at all. They tested false-positives with only a single bug... I'm not defending anthropic and openai either. Their numbers are garbage too since they don't produce false-positive rates either. Why is this "analysis" making the rounds?

It should at least get the same coverage anthropic got then, if not more.

Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that a direct comparison? The link you gave has a quote that says it’s not: > Scoped context: Our tests gave models the vulnerable function directly, often with contextual hints (e.g., "consider wraparound behavior"). A real autonomous discovery pipeline starts from a full codebase with no hints They pointed the models at the known vulnerable functions and gave them a hint. The hint part is what really breaks…

Does no one defending mythos understand how nested foreloops work? loop through each repo: loop through each file: opencode command /find_wraparoundvulnerability next file next repo I can run this on my local LLM and sure, I gotta wait some time for it to complete, but I see zero distinguishing facts here.

Please do so, looking forward to your write up

Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found

#136

All of this discourse seems very bizarre. If smaller models can find these things, that doesn’t mean mythos is worse than we thought. It means all models are more capable. Also if pointing models at files and giving them hints is all it takes to make them find all kinds of stuff, well, we can also spray and pray that pretty well with llms can’t we. It just points to us finding a lot more stuff with only a little bit…

> If smaller models can find these things, that doesn’t mean mythos is worse than we thought. It means all models are more capable.

It means "it's so dangerous we can't release it" was a blatant lie since anthropic would have already known this.

Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found

#137
post #15

The Anthropic writeup addresses this explicitly: > This was the most critical vulnerability we discovered in OpenBSD with Mythos Preview after a thousand runs through our scaffold. Across a thousand runs through our scaffold, the total cost was under $20,000 and found several dozen more findings. While the specific run that found the bug above cost under $50, that number only makes sense with full hindsight. Like any…

> I hypothesize it will find the exploit, but it will also turn up so much irrelevant nonsense that it won't matter. The trick with Mythos wasn't that it didn't hallucinate nonsense vulnerabilities, it absolutely did. It was able to verify some were real though by testing them. The question is if smaller models can verify and test the vulnerabilities too, and can it be done cheaper than these Mythos experiments.

People often undervalue scaffolding. I was looking at a bug yesterday, reported by a tester. He has access to Opus, but he's looking through a single repo, and Amazon Q. It provided some useful information, but the scaffolding wasn't good enough.

I took its preliminary findings into Claude Code with the same model. But in mine it knows where every adjacent system is, the entire git history, deployment history, and state of the feature flags. So instead of pointing at a vague problem, it knew which flag had been flipped in a different service, see how it changed behavior, and how, if the flag was flipped in prod, it'd make the service under testing cry, and which code change to make to make sure it works both ways.

It's not as if a modern Opus is a small model: Just a stronger scaffold, along with more CLI tools available in the context.

The issue here in the security testing is to know exactly what was visible, and how much it failed, because it makes a huge difference. A middling chess player can find amazing combinations at a good speed when playing puzzle rush: You are handed a position where you know a decisive combination exist, and that it works. The same combination, however, might be really hard to find over the board, because in a typical chess game, it's rare for those combinations to exist, and the energy needed to thoroughly check for them, and calculate all the way through every possible thing. This is why chess grandmasters would consider just being able to see the computer score for a position to be massive cheating: Just knowing when the last move was a blunder would be a decisive advantage.

When we ask a cheap model to look for a vulnerability with the right context to actually find it, we are already priming it, vs asking to find one when there's nothing.

Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found

#138
post #123

Wouldn't this mean we're even more cooked? I've seen this page cited a few times as evidence that Mythos is no big deal, but if true then the same big deal is already out there with other models today.

As cooked as we were pre-LLMs knowing that security exploits are relatively easy to learn about online and use, yet things keep chugging along.

Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that a direct comparison? The link you gave has a quote that says it’s not: > Scoped context: Our tests gave models the vulnerable function directly, often with contextual hints (e.g., "consider wraparound behavior"). A real autonomous discovery pipeline starts from a full codebase with no hints They pointed the models at the known vulnerable functions and gave them a hint. The hint part is what really breaks…

Does no one defending mythos understand how nested foreloops work? loop through each repo: loop through each file: opencode command /find_wraparoundvulnerability next file next repo I can run this on my local LLM and sure, I gotta wait some time for it to complete, but I see zero distinguishing facts here.

The question is how customized those hints were. That changes whether looping over an entire code base is possible or not.

Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found

#140
At the center of every security situation is the question, "is the effort worth the reward?"

We prepare security measures based on the perceived effort a bad actor would need to defeat that method, along with considering the harm of the measure being defeated. We don't build Fort Knox for candy bars, it was built for gold bars.

These model advances change the equation. The effort and cost to defeat a measure goes down by an order of magnitude or more.

Things nobody would have considered to reasonably attempt are becoming possible. However. We have 2000-2020s security measures in place that will not survive the AI models of 2026+. The investment to resecure things will be massive, and won't come soon enough.

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