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

anil.recoil.org

91–100 of 141 posts

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

#91
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are trying to secretly fix bugs?

Yes, they don't want the vulnerabilities exposed so they ship the fix in secret, contained in unrelated features.

Ah, I guess that would advertise that users of the old version are vulnerable. I was imagining some altruistic contributor trying to sneak in a bug fix past the maintainer.

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

#92
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they don't want the vulnerabilities exposed so they ship the fix in secret, contained in unrelated features.

Ah, I guess that would advertise that users of the old version are vulnerable. I was imagining some altruistic contributor trying to sneak in a bug fix past the maintainer.

Yep, this is for maintainers releasing fixes to secretly-reported 0days without tipping off attackers who are looking to exploit a (sometimes very large) install base.

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

#93
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…

[dead]

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

#96
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of these things called LLMs are that are quite good at reversing changes in closed source binaries?

you can diff binaries in a disassembler, the technique has been used for a long time to discover patched Microsoft vulnerabilities, create exploits and then race the world. now you can instruct an LLM to do this with MCP...

There are many techniques for making a closed-source binary harder to reverse engineer: polymorphism, symbol stripping, code encryption, packing, and so on. Closed-source binaries at least stand a chance of being effectively obfuscated, unlike open-source code.

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

#97
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can diff binaries in a disassembler, the technique has been used for a long time to discover patched Microsoft vulnerabilities, create exploits and then race the world. now you can instruct an LLM to do this with MCP...

There are many techniques for making a closed-source binary harder to reverse engineer: polymorphism, symbol stripping, code encryption, packing, and so on. Closed-source binaries at least stand a chance of being effectively obfuscated, unlike open-source code.

and those measures have always been merely annoyances. except for the VM methods which impact performance significantly.

now none of those methods matter as you can just instruct an LLM to bang its head against the wall until the wall breaks.

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

#98
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came across rclone at work because "Copy or move data to Azure Storage by using AzCopy v10" is a lie, it literally can't `move` files, only `copy` them. I can't express in polite words how pathetic it is to see the only official blob storage bulk transfer CLI tool from a multi-trillion-dollar company fail to do the simplest, most essential functionality after ten major revisions. Meanwhile, rclone Just Works(tm). T…

Do not try and move the files; that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth... Delete them after you copy.

Right? If you move between file system or device I would expect "move" to be impossible. At best you could copy a logical block and then delete a logical block. If you share a filesystem then perhaps a logical block is a few hundred kilobytes. If you don't then I'd expect the smallest logical block to be the file itself.

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

#99
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came across rclone at work because "Copy or move data to Azure Storage by using AzCopy v10" is a lie, it literally can't `move` files, only `copy` them. I can't express in polite words how pathetic it is to see the only official blob storage bulk transfer CLI tool from a multi-trillion-dollar company fail to do the simplest, most essential functionality after ten major revisions. Meanwhile, rclone Just Works(tm). T…

Do not try and move the files; that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth... Delete them after you copy.

[deleted]

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

#100
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?

Trying to keep the rest of GH online?
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