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Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team

anthropic.com

81–90 of 188 posts

Re: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team

#81
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In many cases, the difference between a bug and an attack vector lies in the closed source areas.

This is going to be the case automating attack detection against most programs where a portion is obscured.

Re: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team

#83

Earlier 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.

Apple is not the kind of company that typically does these things, even if the entire Safari is open source.

Re: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team

#86
post #26

That's one good use of LLMs: fuzzy testing / attack.

Not contradicting this (I am sure it's true), but why is using an LLM for this qualitatively better than using an actual fuzzer?

1. This is a kind of fuzzer. In general it's just great to have many different fuzzers that work in different ways, to get more coverage.

2. I wouldn't say LLMs are "better" than other fuzzers. Someone would need to measure findings/cost for that. But many LLMs do work at a higher level than most fuzzers, as they can generate plausible-looking source code.

Re: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

>"It gives a signal on the account's other comments,"

fair enough. i typically use karma as a rough proxy for that, especially when the user has a lot of it (like, in this case, where the poster is #17 on the leaderboard with 100,000+ karma). you dont get that much karma if you are consistently posting bad takes.

>as well as the value of the original comment (as a hypothesis, albeit a wrong one, versus blind raging).

i dont see, in this case anyways, how or why that distinction would matter or change anything (in this case specifically, what would you change or do differently if it was a hypothesis or simple "raging"?), but im probably just thinking about it incorrectly.

Re: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In many cases, the difference between a bug and an attack vector lies in the closed source areas. This is going to be the case automating attack detection against most programs where a portion is obscured.

However, Firefox also needs to use the closed source OS when running on Windows or macOS.

There are also WebKit-based Linux browsers, which obviously do not use closed-source OS interfaces.

My pessimistic guess on reasoning is that they suspected Firefox to have more tech debt.

Re: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team

#89
Interesting end of the Anthropic report:

> Opus 4.6 is currently far better at identifying and fixing vulnerabilities than at exploiting them. This gives defenders the advantage. And with the recent release of Claude Code Security in limited research preview, we’re bringing vulnerability-discovery (and patching) capabilities directly to customers and open-source maintainers.

> But looking at the rate of progress, it is unlikely that the gap between frontier models’ vulnerability discovery and exploitation abilities will last very long. If and when future language models break through this exploitation barrier, we will need to consider additional safeguards or other actions to prevent our models from being misused by malicious actors.

> We urge developers to take advantage of this window to redouble their efforts to make their software more secure. For our part, we plan to significantly expand our cybersecurity efforts, including by working with developers to search for vulnerabilities (following the CVD process outlined above), developing tools to help maintainers triage bug reports, and directly proposing patches.

Re: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In many cases, the difference between a bug and an attack vector lies in the closed source areas. This is going to be the case automating attack detection against most programs where a portion is obscured.

>In many cases, the difference between a bug and an attack vector lies in the closed source areas.

You say many cases, let's see some examples in Safari.

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