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Claude wrote a full FreeBSD remote kernel RCE with root shell

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Re: Claude wrote a full FreeBSD remote kernel RCE with root shell

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Letting Claude get at the source code to try to find CVEs. I found it particularly entertaining that after finding none it just devolved to a grep for "strcat."

Oh, I see. No, you're wrong. That's absolutely not what it did and not at all an accurate way to sum up what it found. This isn't a complete rebuttal to your argument but I'll note with irony that we're commenting on a thread about a FreeBSD kernel remote that Claude both found and wrote a reliable exploit for (though people will come out of the woodwork to say that reliable exploitation of FreeBSD kernel remotes isn…

It's from the link I posted. Claude's own team in January trying to do exactly what you suggested and ending with results that are less than promising. It's their blog. I assumed it represented the pinnacle of their research.

We're getting a point where anecdotes are being used in place of reason. I'd think you want to ask "how many bug bounties are earned by humans vs AI assistants?" If there's money to be made in finding 0-days then shouldn't there be ample evidence of this?

Re: Claude wrote a full FreeBSD remote kernel RCE with root shell

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I see. No, you're wrong. That's absolutely not what it did and not at all an accurate way to sum up what it found. This isn't a complete rebuttal to your argument but I'll note with irony that we're commenting on a thread about a FreeBSD kernel remote that Claude both found and wrote a reliable exploit for (though people will come out of the woodwork to say that reliable exploitation of FreeBSD kernel remotes isn…

It's from the link I posted. Claude's own team in January trying to do exactly what you suggested and ending with results that are less than promising. It's their blog. I assumed it represented the pinnacle of their research. We're getting a point where anecdotes are being used in place of reason. I'd think you want to ask "how many bug bounties are earned by humans vs AI assistants?" If there's money to be made in f…

You can see now that you assumed wrong.

Re: Claude wrote a full FreeBSD remote kernel RCE with root shell

#113
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's great to clarify, LLMs are actually finding bugs and writing exploits [1][2]. There are more example though. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47589227 [2] https://xbow.com/

Another great example is how Claude is helping Mozilla find zero day exploits in Firefox, by the hundreds, and ranging from minor to CVE level, for over a year: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/hardening-firefox-anthro... I think the Mozilla example is a good one because its a large codebase, lots of people keep asking "how does it do with a large codebase" well there you go.

And you can check the list of bugs being discovered by Anthropic's Red Team: https://red.anthropic.com/

Re: Claude wrote a full FreeBSD remote kernel RCE with root shell

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to vibe coding. If you ever lurk around the various AI subreddits, you'll soon realize just how bad the average prompts and communication skills of most users are. Ironically, models are now being trained on these 5th-grade-level prompts and improving their success with them.

Just think about how your parents used google when you were a kid. What got better results faster?

we were taught google search query syntax by our librarian when I was in high school in 2002-ish. so...

Re: Claude wrote a full FreeBSD remote kernel RCE with root shell

#115

> "Claude wrote" I am hoping that quite soon we will have general acceptance of the fact that "Claude can write code" and we will switch focus to how good / not good that code is.

Read my mind. I want to see what it got right and wrong, whether it's an absolute mess or actually maintainable over time, etc.

Re: Claude wrote a full FreeBSD remote kernel RCE with root shell

#116
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting up fuzzing used to be hard. I haven't tried yet, but my bet is having Claude Code, today, analyze a codebase and suggest where and how to fuzztest it and having it review the crashes and iterate, will produce CVEs.

Our CEO did that at our company and found 33 CVEs. Rails also did that and found 7 or 8.

... get ready for RIF soon.

Re: Claude wrote a full FreeBSD remote kernel RCE with root shell

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's from the link I posted. Claude's own team in January trying to do exactly what you suggested and ending with results that are less than promising. It's their blog. I assumed it represented the pinnacle of their research. We're getting a point where anecdotes are being used in place of reason. I'd think you want to ask "how many bug bounties are earned by humans vs AI assistants?" If there's money to be made in f…

You can see now that you assumed wrong.

No. I can't. That's the point. You've not disclosed what you've done, the link you provided contains locked disclosures I can't access but which appear all to be submitted by humans, and the article itself contains a giant problem, it didn't discover anything, it merely crafted a POC from an existing CVE.

Which is why I'm confused. A limited number of particular people say there's this giant sea change. I cannot find any hard evidence that's true.

If anthropic blog was trying to _sell me_ on their service they failed miserably. So I guess my assumption can, at least, safely be, they have no idea how to market their own product.

Re: Claude wrote a full FreeBSD remote kernel RCE with root shell

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see now that you assumed wrong.

No. I can't. That's the point. You've not disclosed what you've done, the link you provided contains locked disclosures I can't access but which appear all to be submitted by humans, and the article itself contains a giant problem, it didn't discover anything, it merely crafted a POC from an existing CVE. Which is why I'm confused. A limited number of particular people say there's this giant sea change. I cannot find…

The Firefox team has acknowledged the vulnerabilities, which are obviously not "greps for strcat" as you claimed. I mean, you've been refuted; I don't really understand what the argument is supposed to be at this point.

Re: Claude wrote a full FreeBSD remote kernel RCE with root shell

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also depends on if the CVEs can be fixed by LLMs too. If they can find and fix them, then it's very good.

Fixing isn't often a problem for CVEs. The hard part is almost always finding the CVE in the first place. There are some extreme cases that might require extensive code changes, and those would benefit from LLMs. But a lot of the issues are things like off by one issues with pointers.

Fixing is now the bottleneck.

Most patches are non-trivial and then each project/maintainer has a preferred coding style, and they’re being inundated with PRs already, and don’t take kindly to slop.

LLMs can find the CVE fully zero interaction, so it scales trivially.

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