Mozilla betting on AI.
I am concerned.
Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team
71–80 of 188 posts
Re: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? The js engine in Safari is open source, they can put Claude to work on it any time they want.
There's much more to a browser than JS engine. They picked to most open-source one.
WebKit is not open source?
Sure there are closed source parts of Safari, but I'd guess at least 90% of safari attack surface is in WebKit and it's parts.
Re: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team
#73Anthropic's write up[1] is how all AI companies should discuss their product. No hype, honest about what went well and what didn't. They highlighted areas of improvement too. 1: https://www.anthropic.com/news/mozilla-firefox-security
Reads like a promo.
Re: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team
#74Perhaps I missed it but I don't see any false positives mentioned.
[working for Mozilla] That's because there were none. All bugs came with verifiable testcases (crash tests) that crashed the browser or the JS shell. For the JS shell, similar to fuzzing, a small fraction of these bugs were bugs in the shell itself (i.e. testing only) - but according to our fuzzing guidelines, these are not false positives and they will also be fixed.
I guess it is good when bugs are fixed, but are these real bugs or contrived ones? Is anyone doing quality assessment of the bugs here?
I think it was curl that closed its bug bounty program due to AI spam.
Re: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
And now that you know that it isn't, do you feel differently about the logic you used to write this comment?
i am curious, what are you hoping to get out of this comment? will you feel better if they say yes? what is your plan if they say no?
> what are you hoping to get out of this comment?
Rando here. It gives a signal on the account’s other comments, as well as the value of the original comment (as a hypothesis, albeit a wrong one, versus blind raging).
Re: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
[working for Mozilla] That's because there were none. All bugs came with verifiable testcases (crash tests) that crashed the browser or the JS shell. For the JS shell, similar to fuzzing, a small fraction of these bugs were bugs in the shell itself (i.e. testing only) - but according to our fuzzing guidelines, these are not false positives and they will also be fixed.
I guess it is good when bugs are fixed, but are these real bugs or contrived ones? Is anyone doing quality assessment of the bugs here? I think it was curl that closed its bug bounty program due to AI spam.
The bugs are at least of the same quality as our internal fuzzing bugs. They are either crashes or assertion failures, both of these are considered bugs by us. But they have of course a varying value. Not every single assertion failure is ultimately a high impact bug, some of these don't have an impact on the user at all - the same applies to fuzzing bugs though, there is really no difference here. And ultimately we want to fix all of these because assertions have the potential to find very complex bugs, but only if you keep your software "clean" wrt to assertion failures.
The curl situation was completely different because as far as I know, these bugs were not filed with actual testcases. They were purely static bugs and those kinds of reports eat up a lot of valuable resources in order to validate.
Re: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
its just a different attack surface for safari they would need to blackbox attack the browser which is much harder than what they did her
What? The js engine in Safari is open source, they can put Claude to work on it any time they want.
Here's a rough break down, formatted best I can for HN:
Safari (closed source)
├─ UI / tabs / preferences
├─ macOS / iOS integration
└─ WebKit framework (open source) ~60%
├─ WebCore (HTML/CSS/DOM)
├─ JavaScriptCore (JS engine)
└─ Web InspectorRe: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
[working for Mozilla] That's because there were none. All bugs came with verifiable testcases (crash tests) that crashed the browser or the JS shell. For the JS shell, similar to fuzzing, a small fraction of these bugs were bugs in the shell itself (i.e. testing only) - but according to our fuzzing guidelines, these are not false positives and they will also be fixed.
I guess it is good when bugs are fixed, but are these real bugs or contrived ones? Is anyone doing quality assessment of the bugs here? I think it was curl that closed its bug bounty program due to AI spam.
The bugs that were issued CVEs (the Anthropic blog post says there were 22) were all real security bugs.
The level of AI spam for Firefox security submissions is a lot lower than the curl people have described. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe the size of the code base and the higher bar to submitting issues plays a role.
Re: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team
#79I've had mixed results. I find that agents can be great for: 1. Producing new tests to increase coverage. Migrating you to property testing. Setting up fuzzing. Setting up more static analysis tooling. All of that would normally take "time" but now it's a background task. 2. They can find some vulnerabilities. They are "okay" at this, but if you are willing to burn tokens then it's fine. 3. They are absolutely wrong…
This description is also pretty accurate for a lot of real-world SWEs, too. Local bugs are just easier to spot. Imperfect security boundaries often seem sufficient at first glance.
Re: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team
#80I suppose eventually we'll see something like Google's OSS-Fuzz for core open source projects, maybe replacing bug bounty programs a bit. Anthropic already hands out Claude access for free to OSS maintainers. LLMs made it harder to run bug bounty programs where anyone can submit stuff, and where a lot of people flooded them with seemingly well-written but ultimately wrong reports. On the other hand, the newest genera…
Google already has an AI-powered security vulnerability project, called Big Sleep. It has reported a number of issues to open source projects: https://issuetracker.google.com/savedsearches/7155917?pli=1