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SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?

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Re: SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?

#111

The problem with this kind of thing, is that it reduces the S/N (Signal-to-Noise) ratio, so weeding out the legit CVEs becomes a lot more difficult. But, on the other hand, I do know that LLMs have been discovering a lot of legit CVEs, and I will lay odds that the blackhats are leveraging them to the max.

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Re: SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?

#112
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very curious what organisations would have such a policy. I can't imagine it being viable for any size of org without significant self-deception (or banning the use of all open source at which point CVEs are moot anyway).

> I'm very curious what organisations would have such a policy. I would humbly suggest any org of any size that has insurance cover that covers anything tech related (e.g. data loss/recovery, cyber etc.) has a very good look at the small print. Over the last few years insurers have aggressively been adding "no vulnerability patch, no claim" exclusion clauses.

Yeah, policies like this are often not coming from engineering directly but often through other parts of the company like legal, or even sales from contract negotiations. Not that it's entirely comparable, but I was at AWS when the big log4j vulnerability happened, and the handling for it was not left up to individual engineering teams, which I don't think would surprise anyone.

At a large enough company, processes for handling things like security vulnerabilities will have a lot of stakeholders with incentives that are not necessarily perfectly aligned.

Re: SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?

#113

The problem with this kind of thing, is that it reduces the S/N (Signal-to-Noise) ratio, so weeding out the legit CVEs becomes a lot more difficult. But, on the other hand, I do know that LLMs have been discovering a lot of legit CVEs, and I will lay odds that the blackhats are leveraging them to the max.

I'm sending all my condolences out to everyone who is in a corporate environment using tools like Veracode or Snyk to automatically assess for CVEs and block merges or deployments based on "findings". My experience in such environments leads me to believe this is going to be a rough ride for those heavily locked-down enterprises, because depending on the environment, an exception of "this CVE was hallucinated by AI"…

They’re not bad if you give up on being able to reproduce arcane bugs. Don’t pin versions, pull everything from latest, CVEs are just a rebuild. Certainly not an amazing idea, but it solves the problem of the day.

The funnier, Kafakaesque problem of the day is interactions with mandatory cooldown periods on new versions because of supply chain risks.

I’ve had a couple tickets get stuck because the CVE scanner says I have to update, but the cooldown enforcer says the version hasn’t been out long enough.

Re: SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of CVEs are not exploitable, basically noise. I suspect that the overwhelming majority of the CVEs being generated by LLMs are either noise of the sort in the linked article or noise of the sort that is not exploitable.

This is what I truly don't like about the CVE system. One such example is CVE-2023-45853 [1]. Zlib included in it's source an extra set of utilities and add-ons. One such utility, MiniZip, had a buffer overflow vulnerability. BAM, 8.8 CVE (was a 9, looks like they pulled it back a bit). But not one that the 99% of applications using zlib would ever be vulnerable to because almost nobody used the MiniZip utility. It w…

Reminds me of the time our “security” team fought with me for a year to fix an issue in a third-party dependency that was failing their scanners. The issue was only a problem for and intentionally left in to not break support for Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP, neither of which anyone at the company had used in 10 years, and everyone using this software was on a Mac anyway.

My condolences to anyone who’s got to deal with all these slop-y CVEs on one side and brain dead security teams on the other.

Re: SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I truly don't like about the CVE system. One such example is CVE-2023-45853 [1]. Zlib included in it's source an extra set of utilities and add-ons. One such utility, MiniZip, had a buffer overflow vulnerability. BAM, 8.8 CVE (was a 9, looks like they pulled it back a bit). But not one that the 99% of applications using zlib would ever be vulnerable to because almost nobody used the MiniZip utility. It w…

IMHO that’s why binaries and libraries should be separate packages. Drives me buts with npm packages.

They should be in separate packages so you won't force yourself to patch CVEs in the parts you don't use?

Re: SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?

#116
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? It isn't a DoS to assign every single bug fix a CVE! Every single bug is making someone vulnerable in some way.

That's nonsense. The goal is and always has been to undermine the CVE system because Greg does not believe in the system. The kernel is the only project that marks CVEs to fixes, it's the only project that considers every bug to be a "Security" bug, and it has a multi-decades long history of telling the security world to fuck off - all consistent with what I've said. No one else has the process that the kernel has, d…

Or maybe it's ideologically motivated that other groups only identify certain bugs as security bugs?

Re: SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?

#117
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But could an attacker with access to zip tools exploit it to get a root shell? Probably not, but maybe.

Well that's the thing, to build the utilities required extra flags which were pretty rarely enabled. You can, in most distros, ultimately install minizip as a separate package but few do. It's not that useful of a utility. Most people will likely just grab the full blown "zip" application https://infozip.sourceforge.net/Zip.html . Though on linux, even more people are simply using tar with a zlib extension. That's th…

I think this presents a highly fascinating scenario:

1. A vulnerability that presents itself very rarely

2. If it presents itself, it is fatal to the organization

So, few targets are affected, but the outsized effect means that the overall economic impact is not insignificant. How does one keep track of that?

One method is to use a sort of "kirchhoff's law" approach, similar to google page rank. The electrical analogy would be:

- the attacker has a high potential, let's say 1000V. that attacker is the root of a rose tree, going from top to bottom, branching out towards the bottom.

- nodes impossible to exploit present edges with infinite resistance

- nodes that can be exploited present finite resistance (perhaps very low)

- once a node is exploited, its node branches out to other things that now become accessible and may or may not be exploited

- real economic impact presents a connection to ground, measured as 1/($economic impact) ohms resistance

Once you have a structure like that, you can measure the hypothetical current that would be flowing, and measure the severity of such exploits.

Sometimes a single path through a complex system can blow up vital, important parts, and this could be one way to measure it in some sort of objective manner.

Re: SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I truly don't like about the CVE system. One such example is CVE-2023-45853 [1]. Zlib included in it's source an extra set of utilities and add-ons. One such utility, MiniZip, had a buffer overflow vulnerability. BAM, 8.8 CVE (was a 9, looks like they pulled it back a bit). But not one that the 99% of applications using zlib would ever be vulnerable to because almost nobody used the MiniZip utility. It w…

IMHO that’s why binaries and libraries should be separate packages. Drives me buts with npm packages.

Thats not enough. This problem pops up everywhere people do CVE analysis. If a tertiary part of some library is hit by some arbitrary CVE, why should that affect the core functionality people actually use? If I use ChaCha20, and that's bundled in a library with md5.do I care that their md5 library has a vulnerability? No, not really.

If you keep driving the "seperate the packages" angle you end up with is-odd, and that not a nice play to be either.

Re: SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?

#119
post #7
post #3

This is going to be fun for organizations that are mandated to patch all CVEs, isn't it?

This was my first thought, this could be terrible if used offensively. The best defense I can imagine is to have an agent reproduce the issues before a human sees it, but even that will cost money.

If by "terrible" you mean "amazing". Imagine being able to tear down an entire Jenga tower of bullshit corpospeak, and replace it with actual security.

Re: SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?

#120
post #36

Could be just me but I would be quite careful running these PoC's, especially since the CVE's mostly seem nonsensical. I suppose these CVE's could be targeting some kind of PoC execution instead of actual bug reporting? (I didn't look at the code in depth). Why is the repo even mixing CVE's for "schreibfaul1 ESP32-audioI2S" and "SQLite"? Is mixing CVE's for different products in one repo common practice?

There is no specific practice for a repo full of bug reports. Having a repo full of bug reports is already unusual. Normally you report a bug against the software that has a bug, not by creating a file in your own repo.
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