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Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now

dbreunig.com

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Re: Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now

#101
post #39

> Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now Imo, cybersecurity looks like formally verified systems now. You can't spend more tokens to find vulnerabilities if there are no vulnerabilities.

good luck formally verifying everything

I declare ~bankruptcy~ formal verification

Re: Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm. Matching decompilation in particular (where you match the compiler along with your guess at source, compile, then compare assembly, repeating if it doesn't match) is very token-intensive, but it's now very viable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46080498 Of course LLMs see a lot more source-assembly pairs than even skilled reverse engineers, so this makes sense. Any area where you can get unlimited…

My own experience has been that "ghidra -> ask LLM to reason about ghidra decompilation" is very effective on all but the most highly obfuscated binaries. Burning tokens by asking the LLM to compile, disassemble, compare assembly, recompile, repeat seems very wasteful and inefficient to me.

That matches my experience too - LLMs are very capable in "translating" between domains - one of the best experience I've had with LLMs is turning "decompiled" source into "human readable" source. I don't think that "Binary Only" closed-source isn't the defense against this that some people here seem to think it is.

Re: Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now

#103
post #53

There's still the question of access to the codebase. By all accounts, the best LLM cyber scanning approaches are really primitive - it's just a bash script that goes through every single file in the codebase and, for each one and runs a "find the vulns here" prompt. The attacker usually has even less access than this - in the beginning, they have network tools, an undocumented API, and maybe some binaries. You can d…

On that latest episode of 'Security Cryptography Whatever' [0] they mention that the time spent on improving the harness (at the moment) end up being outperformed by the strategy of "wait for the next model". I doubt that will continue, but it broke my intuition about how to improve them [0] https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2026/03/25/ai-bug-f...

It’s a good thing to keep in mind, but LLM + scaffolding is clearly superior. So if you just use vanilla LLMs you will always be behind.

I think the important thing is to avoid over-optimizing. Your scaffold, not avoid building one altogether.

Re: Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now

#104

> If corporations that rely on OSS libraries spend to secure them with tokens, it’s likely going to be more secure than your budget allows. That's a really big "if". Particularly since so many companies don't even know all of the OSS they are using, and they often use OSS to offload the cost of maintaining it themselves. My hope is when the dust settles, we see more OSS SAST tools that are much better at detecting vu…

> Particularly since so many companies don't even know all of the OSS they are using, and they often use OSS to offload the cost of maintaining it themselves.

Companies that market to the EU are going to need to find out real fast.

Re: Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now

#105
post #14

I've said for decades that, in principle , cybersecurity is advantage defender. The defender has to leave a hole. The attackers have to find it. We just live in a world with so many holes that dedicated attackers rarely end up bottlenecked on finding holes, so in practice it ends up advantage attacker. There is at least a possibility that a code base can be secured by a (practically) finite number of tokens until the…

>in principle, cybersecurity is advantage defender I disagree. The defender must be right every single time. The attacker only has to get lucky and thanks to scale they can do that every day all day in most large organizations.

The defender must be right every single time, and the attacker right only once.

Until the attacker has initial access.

Then the attacker needs to be right every single time.

Re: Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now

#106

There's still the question of access to the codebase. By all accounts, the best LLM cyber scanning approaches are really primitive - it's just a bash script that goes through every single file in the codebase and, for each one and runs a "find the vulns here" prompt. The attacker usually has even less access than this - in the beginning, they have network tools, an undocumented API, and maybe some binaries. You can d…

> There's a massive cost asymmetry between the "hardening" phase for the defender and the "discovering exploits" phase for the attacker.

Well, you need to harden everything, the attacker only needs to find one or at most a handful of exploits.

Re: Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now

#107
post #29

There's still the question of access to the codebase. By all accounts, the best LLM cyber scanning approaches are really primitive - it's just a bash script that goes through every single file in the codebase and, for each one and runs a "find the vulns here" prompt. The attacker usually has even less access than this - in the beginning, they have network tools, an undocumented API, and maybe some binaries. You can d…

The problem, though, is that this turns "one of our developers was hit by a supply chain attack that never hit prod, we wiped their computer and rotated keys, and it's not like we're a big target for the attacker to make much use of anything they exfiltrated..." into "now our entire source code has been exfiltrated and, even with rudimentary line-by-line scanning, will be automatically audited for privilege escalatio…

> Taken to an extreme, the end result is a dark forest.

Sorry, how does that work?

Re: Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now

#108
post #8

There's still the question of access to the codebase. By all accounts, the best LLM cyber scanning approaches are really primitive - it's just a bash script that goes through every single file in the codebase and, for each one and runs a "find the vulns here" prompt. The attacker usually has even less access than this - in the beginning, they have network tools, an undocumented API, and maybe some binaries. You can d…

Tokens can also be burnt on decompilation.

> Tokens can also be burnt on decompilation.

Prediction 1. We're going to have cheap "write Photoshop and AutoCad in Rust as a new program / FOSS" soon. No desktop software will be safe. Everything will be cloned.

Prediction 2. We'll have a million Linux and Chrome and other FOSS variants with completely new codebases.

Prediction 3. People will trivially clone games, change their assets. Modding will have a renaissance like never before.

Prediction 4. To push back, everything will move to thin clients.

Re: Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now

#109
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and it apparently burns lots of tokens. But what I've heard is that the outcomes are drastically less expensive than hand-reversing was, when you account for labor costs.

Can confirm. Matching decompilation in particular (where you match the compiler along with your guess at source, compile, then compare assembly, repeating if it doesn't match) is very token-intensive, but it's now very viable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46080498 Of course LLMs see a lot more source-assembly pairs than even skilled reverse engineers, so this makes sense. Any area where you can get unlimited…

Has anyone used an LLM to deobfuscate compiled Javascript?

Re: Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now

#110
post #53

There's still the question of access to the codebase. By all accounts, the best LLM cyber scanning approaches are really primitive - it's just a bash script that goes through every single file in the codebase and, for each one and runs a "find the vulns here" prompt. The attacker usually has even less access than this - in the beginning, they have network tools, an undocumented API, and maybe some binaries. You can d…

On that latest episode of 'Security Cryptography Whatever' [0] they mention that the time spent on improving the harness (at the moment) end up being outperformed by the strategy of "wait for the next model". I doubt that will continue, but it broke my intuition about how to improve them [0] https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2026/03/25/ai-bug-f...

And if you have the better harness and the next model?
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