61–70 of 371 posts
It's just the same advice as ever: be extremely, exceedingly careful in what you expose to any network. When I set up machines for production, they don't respond to pings and they don't even have an SSH port open without knocking. There are also ways to eschew the need for an SSH port entirely. People who never took that seriously will never take this seriously either, and that's their loss. (And loss of the commons,…
> This probably sounds like nonsense words or hysterical overreacting to most people, so here's what that means: "GLM" is a kind of LLM (AI) [...] The post also sounds like that to people that understand the technology. Calling that out like this and trying to pin that assessment to lack of knowledge is not a get-out-of-jail-free card, nor a good move. __ Edit: Having spent some time letting the article marinate in m…
the difference between attack and defense is that attacks can be throwaway code. it's much easier to let an llm hack out a prototype than to get it to build maintainable code that people want to read and review. it's not enough to get Daybreak or Mythos to write you a patch, you need the author of the project to accept and merge it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s fine for your home server, but if you want an actual server that the general public can use, it has to be exposed to the internet.
I didn't say there are zero ports open, they're not my home server, I just said they're production servers. But exposing something like a properly configured nginx to the internet is way different from exposing application code directly. Most of my servers have used h2o (built from source because they don't cut releases anymore?) because I wanted HTTP2 and HTTP3 before anyone else would get their act together. These…
I don't think we even have a year. The current batch of LLMs are ferociously good at identifying vulnerabilities.
Can confirm. I work at an e-commerce agency where we work with (among others) Adobe Commerce. The number of unauthorized RCE vulnerabilities being reported not only in the core product, but also very popular modules used in the community[1] is going through the roof. And we are having a lot of close calls, too; just last weekend, a 0day[2] was widely being exploited at a large scale, before any publication or patch.…
Probably a lot more "coding as a job" and "as a job" also implies "not my department".
So it's not necessarily the LLMs being very good, but might also "just" be that the software is very bad.
It's just the same advice as ever: be extremely, exceedingly careful in what you expose to any network. When I set up machines for production, they don't respond to pings and they don't even have an SSH port open without knocking. There are also ways to eschew the need for an SSH port entirely. People who never took that seriously will never take this seriously either, and that's their loss. (And loss of the commons,…
So how do you expose your legitimate service on the Internet?
> Invest in formal verification, fuzzing and property testing, and memory-safe languages. LLMs are good at writing Lean and fuzz tests. I don't care whether you use Go or Rust but for the love of god please don't use C or C++ for new code. How accepted is this thinking in your respective domains?
Mobile platforms, distributed computing have long moved the spotligh away from C and C++, other than language runtimes or existing products from the 90's like SQL servers, and naturally UNIX like underlying OS, which most userspace developers aren't writing new code for.
Naturally there are domains like LLVM/GCC, console game dev, HPC/HFT where they are unavoidable for new code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't say there are zero ports open, they're not my home server, I just said they're production servers. But exposing something like a properly configured nginx to the internet is way different from exposing application code directly. Most of my servers have used h2o (built from source because they don't cut releases anymore?) because I wanted HTTP2 and HTTP3 before anyone else would get their act together. These…
And then somebody driving an LLM will find your old and unsupported (how secure!) h2o server, find a 0day path traversal or RCE and own you.
FWIW sufficiently secured software doesn't need to be updated. Doesn't matter if it's old and unsupported if there are no vulnerabilities in it.
That said, h2o is probably far from free of at least some vulnerabilities, not to mention all the layers below it. OpenSSL for example has had some vulnerabilities, and h2o depends on it.
I'm not saying I exactly practice what I preach. h2o's definitely a choice, but realistically I doubt anything's going to happen that I really care about.
Zzzzz, we should have gotten security right a few decades ago. But security costs money and isn't a flashy feature to attract new customers, or cuts into your margin if you're a "real" business producing stuff or offering some service. Or whatever the decision makers in Berlin were thinking when they ignored security. Yeah, we would still see hacks, but we would see less of them if security wasn't optional. Maybe the…
I was contracted in to a place to do among other things cyber security insurance audits, and they asked me to stop doing them because I refused to lie to their insurer. "Wait but if we only score 20 / 300 that makes us look kind of bad" uh huh.
Here's an idea: as a first step, simplify everything, and make sure you're aware how your stack works, and what it imports. As an example: WordPress is a horrible thing, but the core has been through so much, that it's suprisingly secure. Then plugins and themes come, and whoosh, the security is gone. We need a new KISS: keep it simple, stupid, secure.
The reason is simple - nothing really bad has happened that we can point at and say "ah, shit, let's all learn collectively". I know it sounds naive when I say it, but there hasn't been a significantly consequential hack, leak, destruction, or anything related to cybersecurity where it led for concerns of people. The main thing I can think of is cyber insurance, which requires a bunch of audits, and some checks maybe…
How consequential does a hack need to be? Troy has collected literally billions of stolen credentials. Equifax has had high profile data leaks. Tens of millions of people have been directly compromised by ransomware (likely higher because that’s just the cases we know of) and you hear about state-sponsored hacks in the news all the time.
The problem isn’t that computer security isn’t in the public consciousness. The problem is people are lazy and security often requires trading convenience. The problem is also that security isn’t free. So the business incentives just isn’t there.
In other fields of engineering, people die when shortcuts are taken. Yet businesses will still take shortcuts, so governments have to legislate rules to save people’s lives. So why would you expect software companies to do better when the stakes are lower?