Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days

anil.recoil.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 141 posts

Re: Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days

#11

Post by flanked-evergl »

johnbarron wrote: post #10
godelski wrote: post #6

It's easier to find bugs, fix them, yet there's less will than ever. My bosses just want speed and will give me a 30 minute lecture on why I don't need to solve a bug that Claude solved in 5 minutes, I've verified, and it's already in an open PR. All the while we're pushing out bugs faster and faster. No matter how good AI gets at fixing bugs we'll never fix them when there's no will to fix things. Software will neve…

You will see, they will change both laws and expectations, to say its normal for software to always have terrible bugs. You can always solve a problem by lowering your expectations. :-)

What law says software may not have bugs?!

Re: Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days

#12

Post by happyopossum »

bri3d wrote: post #4

I don't think this is new with LLMs (finding an exploit based on a few words offhand has always been a fun part of exploit development), but it's scaled and democratized to mass exploitation of low value targets. Backing exploit PoCs out of patches, commit messages, and random overheard or over-read sentences is a practice as old as vulnerability research. The difference with LLMs is that an explosion in actors "skil…

> Backing exploit PoCs out of patches, commit messages, and random overheard or over-read sentences is a practice as old as vulnerability research

True, but it used to take days or weeks of research, testing, and RE to get those PoCs.

Today the entire chain - reading commits, RE patch binaries, building exploit, scripting exploit scan, $profit - can be fully automated and happen in minutes or hours.

Re: Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days

#13

Post by vasco »

godelski wrote: post #6

It's easier to find bugs, fix them, yet there's less will than ever. My bosses just want speed and will give me a 30 minute lecture on why I don't need to solve a bug that Claude solved in 5 minutes, I've verified, and it's already in an open PR. All the while we're pushing out bugs faster and faster. No matter how good AI gets at fixing bugs we'll never fix them when there's no will to fix things. Software will neve…

If your boss asks for X feature and you split it into 4 PRs, 3 that implement X and a 4th that fixes a security bug, how would they know? Someone that uses those 30mins like that isn't reviewing your PRs themselves. Just fix it and be done with it. You only needed to argue with the boss when you needed to make time for it which would delay something else. If it just appears done they'll just react with clap emoji later when you announced you also fixed this extra thing.

Re: Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days

#14

Post by dataviz1000 »

nickcw wrote: post #3

This describes my life as an open source maintainer at the moment! In the first 10 years of the rclone project we received about 20 security disclosures through GitHub. We had to deal with over 40 in the last month! That has taken a huge amount of my time, even using AI tools to triage and come up with fixes for review. The hit rate for those security disclosures is pretty good - about 75% of them have a nugget of so…

> even using AI tools to triage

Can you discuss this? I might be able to help.

Re: Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days

#15

Post by ryandrake »

godelski wrote: post #6

It's easier to find bugs, fix them, yet there's less will than ever. My bosses just want speed and will give me a 30 minute lecture on why I don't need to solve a bug that Claude solved in 5 minutes, I've verified, and it's already in an open PR. All the while we're pushing out bugs faster and faster. No matter how good AI gets at fixing bugs we'll never fix them when there's no will to fix things. Software will neve…

Most places I've worked have been infuriatingly uninterested in fixing bugs, and would release software with major known bugs and a vague plan to fix them later. Of course, when "later" came, there were more features to cram. No time to fix those bugs.

I'm hoping one of the unintended side effect of it being essentially free to find and exploit (and fix) software bugs is that companies become less cavalier about shipping bugs in their software. Unlike most of the industry I don't believe "bugs are inevitable." Bugs are a choice developers make when they're rushing and careless and when all of their incentives are to ship quickly. You can ship bug-free software but it takes (or used to take) a really long time and a lot of care, care that commercial software developers just don't ever seem to muster.

Maybe when their software is getting 0wned over and over and 30 security issues are published a day, they'll start caring and taking their time.

Re: Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days

#16

Post by dannyw »

nickcw wrote: post #3

This describes my life as an open source maintainer at the moment! In the first 10 years of the rclone project we received about 20 security disclosures through GitHub. We had to deal with over 40 in the last month! That has taken a huge amount of my time, even using AI tools to triage and come up with fixes for review. The hit rate for those security disclosures is pretty good - about 75% of them have a nugget of so…

Thank you for making and maintaining rclone. It is truly a blessing.

Re: Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days

#19

Post by avsm »

loeg wrote: post #17

No mention of memory safe languages? Sure, it does not help existing projects, and sure, of course you can still have logic bugs (or memory bugs using escape hatches like unsafe). But they do help significantly in reducing the number of exploitable bugs.

OCaml (the language I use in the post) is an extremely memory safe language, but there are plenty of higher level logic issues that spring up.

LLMs are extremely good at finding corner-case vulnerabilities in C bindings even within a memory safe language; see for example the fixes in an OCaml crypto library here: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/the-series-of-mirage-crypto-rele...

Re: Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days

#20

Post by zingababba »

Transferring ideas in their abstract form is entirely possible now. What this blog post describes I believe even undersells the current reality. I've had success with finding crits by pasting in extremely high level or abstract concepts. I recently went from a talk abstract (3-4 sentences) to crits lol (finding that vuln type).
Post reply on HN