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cURL removes bug bounties

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11–20 of 271 posts

Re: cURL removes bug bounties

#11
post #2

A list of the slop if anyone is interested: https://gist.github.com/bagder/07f7581f6e3d78ef37dfbfc81fd1d...

I looked at two reports, and I can’t tell if the reports are directly from an ai or some very junior student not really understanding security. LLms to me sound generally more convincing.

Re: cURL removes bug bounties

#14

Just use an LLM to weed them out. What’s so hard about that?

Because LLMs are bad at reviewing code for the same reasons they are bad at making it? They get tricked by fancy clean syntax and take long descriptions / comments for granted without considering the greater context.

Re: cURL removes bug bounties

#15

An entry fee that is reimbursed if the bug turns out to matter would stop this, real quick. Then again, I once submitted a bug report to my bank, because the login method could be switched from password+pin to pin only, when not logged in, and they closed it as "works as intended", because they had decided that an optional password was more convenient than a required password. (And that's not even getting into the di…

Agreed, although the reimbursement should be based on whether a reasonable person could consider that to be a vulnerability. Often it’s tricky for outsiders to tell whether a behaviour is expected or a vulnerability

Re: cURL removes bug bounties

#16

An entry fee that is reimbursed if the bug turns out to matter would stop this, real quick. Then again, I once submitted a bug report to my bank, because the login method could be switched from password+pin to pin only, when not logged in, and they closed it as "works as intended", because they had decided that an optional password was more convenient than a required password. (And that's not even getting into the di…

> An entry fee that is reimbursed if the bug turns out to matter would stop this, real quick.

I refer to this as the Notion-to-Confluence cost border.

When Notion first came out, it was snappy and easy to use. Creating a page being essentially free of effort, you very quickly had thousands of them, mostly useless.

Confluence, at least in west EU, is offensively slow. The thought of adding a page is sufficiently demoralizing that it's easier to update an existing page and save yourself minutes of request time outs. Consequently, there's some ~20 pages even in large companies.

I'm not saying that sleep(15 * SECOND) is the way to counter, but once something becomes very easy to do at scale, it explodes to the point where the original utility is now lost in a sea of noise.

Re: cURL removes bug bounties

#17
post #9

It seems open source loses the most from AI. Open source code trained the models, the models are being used to spam open source projects anywhere there's incentive, they can be used to chip away at open source business models by implementing paid features and providing the support, and eventually perhaps AI simply replaces most open source code

I wouldn't say open source code solely trained the models, surely there are CS courses and textbooks, official documentation as well as transcripts of talks and courses all factor in as well.

On another note, regarding AI replacing most open source code. I forget what tool it was, but I had a need for a very niche way of accessing an old Android device it was rooted, but if I used something like Disk Drill it would eventually crap out empty files. So I found a GUI someone made, and started asking Claude to add things I needed for it to a) let me preview directories it was seeing and b) let me sudo up, and let me download with a reasonable delay (1s I think) which basically worked, I never had issues again, it was a little slow to recover old photos, but oh well.

I debated pushing the code changes back into github, it works as expected, but it drifted from the maintainers own goals I'm sure.

Re: cURL removes bug bounties

#18

An entry fee that is reimbursed if the bug turns out to matter would stop this, real quick. Then again, I once submitted a bug report to my bank, because the login method could be switched from password+pin to pin only, when not logged in, and they closed it as "works as intended", because they had decided that an optional password was more convenient than a required password. (And that's not even getting into the di…

> An entry fee that is reimbursed if the bug turns out to matter would stop this, real quick.

The problem is that bug bounty slop works. A lot of companies with second-tier bug bounties outsource triage to contractors (there's an entire industry built around that). If a report looks plausible, the contractor files a bug. The engineers who receive the report are often not qualified to debate exploitability, so they just make the suggested fix and move on. The reporter gets credit or a token payout. Everyone is happy.

Unless you have a top-notch security team with a lot of time on their hands, pushing back is not in your interest. If you keep getting into fights with reporters, you'll eventually get it wrong and you're gonna get derided on HN and get headlines about how you don't take security seriously.

In this model, it doesn't matter if you require a deposit, because on average, bogus reports still pay off. You also create an interesting problem that a sketchy vendor can hold the reporter's money hostage if the reporter doesn't agree to unreasonable terms.

Re: cURL removes bug bounties

#19
post #2

A list of the slop if anyone is interested: https://gist.github.com/bagder/07f7581f6e3d78ef37dfbfc81fd1d...

In the second report, Daniel greeted the slopper very kindly and tried to start a conversation with them. But the slopper calls him by the completely wrong name. And this was December 2023. It must have been extremely tiring.

Re: cURL removes bug bounties

#20

An entry fee that is reimbursed if the bug turns out to matter would stop this, real quick. Then again, I once submitted a bug report to my bank, because the login method could be switched from password+pin to pin only, when not logged in, and they closed it as "works as intended", because they had decided that an optional password was more convenient than a required password. (And that's not even getting into the di…

> An entry fee that is reimbursed if the bug turns out to matter would stop this, real quick. I refer to this as the Notion-to-Confluence cost border. When Notion first came out, it was snappy and easy to use. Creating a page being essentially free of effort, you very quickly had thousands of them, mostly useless. Confluence, at least in west EU, is offensively slow. The thought of adding a page is sufficiently demor…

It’s strange how sensitive humans are to these sort of relative perceived efforts. Having a charged, cordless vacuum cleaner ready to go and take around the house has also changed our vacuuming game. Because carrying a big unwieldy vacuum cleaner and needing to find a power socket at every location just feels like much more effort. Even though it really isn't.
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