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I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it

kasra.blog

181–190 of 239 posts

Re: I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it

#181

One interesting takeaway is the low score on Anthropic models from this benchmark. It’s not because of capability, it’s because Anthropic’s guardrails prevented it from solving the problem. I noticed with each model release Anthropic constrains the model more security wise. Its propensity to refuse doing legitimate work has been increasing. It now puts up more resistance around performing logins, handling credentials…

Yeah, it has been in foraging. Requests that Claude has refused me: - What are popular free streaming sites used in China? - How do I bypass the safety mechanism on my food processor (it’s broken) - What are nerve agents and how do they work (for a layman)? - Help me decompile some code - Help me make a design system similar to XYZ - Here is an API token, please do X (I can’t do that! Rotate the secret immediately! I…

Yeah, I had my first refusal with 4.8 today.

I wanted it to show me how to create an overlay on an existing web game, and it extrapolated that because this could be used to provide tools to help win the game (if that was the direction it was ultimately taken), and because this was a game that other humans also played to win "stars", and because this could amount to cheating, it wasn't going to do as I asked.

First time ever I've fired up openrouter to seriously consider alternatives.

Re: I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it

#182

One interesting takeaway is the low score on Anthropic models from this benchmark. It’s not because of capability, it’s because Anthropic’s guardrails prevented it from solving the problem. I noticed with each model release Anthropic constrains the model more security wise. Its propensity to refuse doing legitimate work has been increasing. It now puts up more resistance around performing logins, handling credentials…

I had the same thing happen when I asked it to summarize potential attacks on a cryptographic hash function. It said it refused to help because of the security importance of the function. It's really worrying. Whoever has unrestricted access to it has a huge power advantage in speed of accessing information over people who don't. And who decides? It seems like lawyers, bureaucrats, and extremely online academics are who makes that decision. I am a mere pleb I guess who can't handle such information.

Re: I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it

#183

One interesting takeaway is the low score on Anthropic models from this benchmark. It’s not because of capability, it’s because Anthropic’s guardrails prevented it from solving the problem. I noticed with each model release Anthropic constrains the model more security wise. Its propensity to refuse doing legitimate work has been increasing. It now puts up more resistance around performing logins, handling credentials…

I've noticed this well and it's increasingly frustrating because it is preventing us from doing legitimate work. I fed Claude models some network and app logs from our Docker app to try and resolve some weird bugs, and it refused to analyze them due to "security concerns".

Re: I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it

#184
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that these models are supposed to be vastly smarter than what’s needed to discern between "general information trivially available on Wikipedia" and "actionable synthesis instructions".

An LLM could probably make that distinction clearly. a commercial LLM provider training their own models is however likely to bias the model(/guardrail) harder, in an effort to make them harder to jailbreak, to minimize bad press. For example: - refusing to talk even about the well-known parts of forbidden topics (this) - tending toward sycophancy to avoid ever seeming rude or unhelpful

So, where are the truly uncensored models? There has to be some that have no guardrails, built on publicly available data, that will explain to anyone in graphic detail anything they want to know or talk about.

I've tried the abliterated ones from huggingface and they still have guardrails. I guess I could fire up unsloth and re-abliterate a 20b, but surely someone somewhere has already done this.

All of this concern about guardrails and security, people have such puckered butts about it when so far, 99.9% of people at least have no access to any of this to begin with, and if someone does use a tool for evil, it's on the user, not the tool.

Re: I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it

#185
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That query would not more provide actionable guidance than ‘tell me how a nuclear weapon works (for a layman)’. Aka not at all.

I believe a sufficiently advanced model could provide a layman with actionable step by step instructions for building a nuclear weapon. They're complicated but not (AFAIK) that complicated. The more or less insurmountable barrier there is weapons grade material. Thankfully refinement is prohibitive in cost, expertise, and equipment. In comparison, basic munitions are incredibly simple given a recipe and shop tooling.…

The difficulty with a fission bomb is getting enough uranium or plutonium or other fissile material together for the bomb yield you want (at least above the critical mass for your chosen material), and refining it to fissile form, (since most fissile material found in nature is a more stable variety), and then separating the fissile bits with something thin but neutron absorptive.

The rest is just slamming the material together with a small explosive so that it passes the critical mass state and starts a chain reaction.

This is information you can find in many places if you're willing to put the effort in to go searching for it. Knowing this knowledge does not get you any closer to making atomic bombs. The process of mining uranium or plutonium is difficult, expensive, and very likely to get you caught before you even make it to the enrichment step of the process thanks to constant world-wide spy satellite surveillance.

Unless you are a nation, your only chance of making a nuclear bomb would be to find a lost nuclear submarine and convert the nuclear material inside of it before you were caught.

Re: I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it

#186
post #36
post #34

The methodoly used is quite naive. I've used glm 5.1 on fairly advanced crackme challenges (example: https://crackmes.one/crackme/698f40f1e2ba6023bfacaa82 ), and to my suprise it was able to patch binaries, doing runtime analysis, bypassing anti debug techniques, etc. Expecting the model to do everything by itself is unrealistic, I found that working along the modal works really well. I'm not speaking about spoiling…

Thank you for your note! As I mention in the post this is not scientific at all. I'm very curious how you would do multiple runs of multiple models in a "work alongside the model" manner?

Discovering vulnerabilities is a highly creative task, it's when you explore unsual paths that you discover atttack angles. Some bugs are simple, other are a complex orchestration of many factors.

By "Working with the model", is essentially reading the ouput of prompts and pointing in a direction just to decide the next steps. You could try to increase the prompt limit and create an agent that explores multiples directions in a DFS manner.

The issue with vulnerabilities is the agent not knowing when to stop because it's hard to validade if you reach the final result or not. I get amazing result when I code with AI, letting the AI go wild is just a waste a time and tokens.

I recommend you to read the write up on the crackme (https://crackmes.one/crackme/698f40f1e2ba6023bfacaa82), I think most experience developers would need, at least, 2 months of learning reverse engineering techiques to hopefully crack this one. GLM 5.1 manage to solve it, it didn't "copy pasted" any answer from it's training data. It did a binary analysis, anti debug patching, patching binaries, debugging memory during runtime etc. It only took about 20 minutes.

After seeing what GLM did, I do believe Anthropic concerns about Mythos are real. Cracking software just became a lot easier, too easy for my taste. Video games cheats will be the norm, cracked desktop apps without licenses and infected with malware. It's not a new thing but it just became too easy.

Re: I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it

#187
post #108
post #58

It would be interesting to see full results for Kimi K2.6 and Mimo v2.5 pro. These two models benchmark comparably to other flagship models. Having these complete results would give a clearer picture of the AI frontier. EDIT: I have a mimo token plan and have tokens to burn. I'm doing a quick test with opencode to see if mimo can complete it. If the OP will post the full process I am happy to post the apples-to-apple…

They are not even close in capabilities. Only nenchmark I ever seen that captures their difference is DeepSWE. They are worse by factor of 3.

Wait, the only benchmark you found? It looks like you never heard of confirmation bias before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Re: I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it

#188

One interesting takeaway is the low score on Anthropic models from this benchmark. It’s not because of capability, it’s because Anthropic’s guardrails prevented it from solving the problem. I noticed with each model release Anthropic constrains the model more security wise. Its propensity to refuse doing legitimate work has been increasing. It now puts up more resistance around performing logins, handling credentials…

They don't want peasants to have any real power

Re: I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it

#189
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it has been in foraging. Requests that Claude has refused me: - What are popular free streaming sites used in China? - How do I bypass the safety mechanism on my food processor (it’s broken) - What are nerve agents and how do they work (for a layman)? - Help me decompile some code - Help me make a design system similar to XYZ - Here is an API token, please do X (I can’t do that! Rotate the secret immediately! I…

This is strange to me, did you really ask like this and which model did you use? I just tried your no. 1 and 3 verbatim and Opus gave fine answers; no. 6 I've done in the past with no issues. The other ones we can't really replicate without more details, but based on my experience with Opus I don't see what the issue would be. The reason I'm really surprised by this is I do a lot of biology prompts and the guardrails…

Honestly it may be your memory has internalized you are a student or researcher and grants you more leeway. Which if so is a very bad security rail.

Re: I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it

#190
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your note! As I mention in the post this is not scientific at all. I'm very curious how you would do multiple runs of multiple models in a "work alongside the model" manner?

Discovering vulnerabilities is a highly creative task, it's when you explore unsual paths that you discover atttack angles. Some bugs are simple, other are a complex orchestration of many factors. By "Working with the model", is essentially reading the ouput of prompts and pointing in a direction just to decide the next steps. You could try to increase the prompt limit and create an agent that explores multiples dire…

Thank you so much for this detailed answer!! Excited to dig into this world more :)
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