The coming industrialisation of exploit generation with LLMs

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 5:03 AM UTC

rvz wrote: post #39

simonw wrote: post #5

> In the hardest task I challenged GPT-5.2 it to figure out how to write a specified string to a specified path on disk, while the following protections were enabled: address space layout randomisation, non-executable memory, full RELRO, fine-grained CFI on the QuickJS binary, hardware-enforced shadow-stack, a seccomp sandbox to prevent shell execution, and a build of QuickJS where I had stripped all functionality in…

Tells you all you need to know around how extremely weak a C executable like QuickJS is for LLMs to exploit. (If you as an infosec researcher prompt them correctly to find and exploit vulnerabilities). > Leak a libc Pointer via Use-After-Free. The exploit uses the vulnerability to leak a pointer to libc. I doubt Rust would save you here unless the binary has very limited calls to libc, but would be much harder for a…

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 5:04 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #47

rvz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tells you all you need to know around how extremely weak a C executable like QuickJS is for LLMs to exploit. (If you as an infosec researcher prompt them correctly to find and exploit vulnerabilities). > Leak a libc Pointer via Use-After-Free. The exploit uses the vulnerability to leak a pointer to libc. I doubt Rust would save you here unless the binary has very limited calls to libc, but would be much harder for a…

"C executables" are most of the frontier of exploit development, which is why this is a meaningful model problem.

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 5:15 AM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #12

protocolture wrote: post #2

I genuinely dont know who to believe. The people who claim LLMs are writing excellent exploits. Or the people who claim that LLMs are sending useless bug reports. I dont feel like both can really be true.

With the exploits, you can try them and they either work or they don't. An attacker is not especially interested in analysing why the successful ones work. With the CVE reports some poor maintainer has to go through and triage them, which is far more work, and very asymmetrical because the reporters can generate their spam reports in volume while each one requires detailed analysis.

Post by lateral_cloud » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 5:24 AM UTC

er4hn wrote: post #3

I think the author makes some interesting points, but I'm not that worried about this. These tools feel symmetric for defenders to use as well. There's an easy to see path that involves running "LLM Red Teams" in CI before merging code or major releases. The fact that it's a somewhat time expensive (I'm ignoring cost here on purpose) test makes it feel similar to fuzzing for where it would fit in a pipeline. New tool…

Post by pizlonator » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 5:26 AM UTC

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #74

pizlonator wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not symmetric at all. There are countless bugs to fund. If the offender runs these tools, then any bug they find becomes a cyberweapon. If the defender runs these tools, they will not thwart the offender unless they find and fix all of the bugs. Any vs all is not symmetric

How do bug bounties change the calculus? Assuming rational white hats who will report every bug which costs fewer LLM tokens than the bounty, on expectation.