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

anil.recoil.org

31–40 of 141 posts

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

#31
post #5
post #2

[flagged]

They were not happy about it and loudly warned everyone it was coming, but instead of listening a lot of people said LoL MaRkEtInG.

Well, maybe we would say different things if they shared the bounties of being the chosen one.

Even dictators have to share.

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

#32
I think roll-out and deployment are even bigger issues. Who updates their software stack within 10 minutes? Most CI runs take longer to verify the business logic is still working.

Add to that the danger of supply-chain attacks where you don't even want automatic updates.

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

#33
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.

Yeah, but there's already plenty written on that topic elsewhere; the OP is making a distinctly different point and everything else in it still applies, I think. Even if you are using a memory safe language -- if you are developing security sensitive software, you need to understand that exploits can now be researched, developed, and deployed in hours (or for stupid bugs, minutes!) instead of days or weeks or months. And this process can now just be massively scaled up with money and compute. It was not like this even 24 months ago.

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

#34
I do wonder what the hit rate is in general for Claude finding a successful exploit when prompted with a rumor that leads it to assume the bug is there.

“I’m told there’s a path traversal exploit in this package. Can you find it?” - probably a reasonably high chance of it finding one, even if you just made that rumor up.

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

#36
post #24

Sounds like the next step is to start rumors about vulnerabilities so that someone else will find them and you have plausible deniability. "Hey, did you hear? Someone told me might be leaking their logs from a publicly accessible endpoint..."

[flagged]

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

#38
post #27
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 described my experience in the workforce to a t! So frustrating that tech managers look at tech debt as a thing to be maintained at a certain level instead of allowing us to achieve perfection

> instead of allowing us to achieve perfection

Huh?

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

#39
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…

> GitHub assigns CVEs for the advisories. Before the AI apocalypse they took 2-3 days for an assignment but now it they are running at 3-4 weeks so I have to send the point releases out with CVE-PENDING in the changelog which isn't ideal.

A strange bottleneck; anyone know why that would be so slow?

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

#40
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…

> GitHub assigns CVEs for the advisories. Before the AI apocalypse they took 2-3 days for an assignment but now it they are running at 3-4 weeks so I have to send the point releases out with CVE-PENDING in the changelog which isn't ideal. A strange bottleneck; anyone know why that would be so slow?

human triage in review
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