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Comment by stuxf | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that they counted these as security vulnerabilities (from the linked Anthropic article)

> “Crude” is an important caveat here. The exploits Claude wrote only worked on our testing environment, which intentionally removed some of the security features found in modern browsers. This includes, most importantly, the sandbox, the purpose of which is to reduce the impact of these types of vulnerabilities. Thus, Firefox’s “defense in depth” would have been effective at mitigating these particular exploits.

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[Work at Anthropic, used to work at Mozilla.]

Firefox has never required a full chain exploit in order to consider something a vulnerability. A large proportion of disclosed Firefox vulnerabilities are vulnerabilities in the sandboxed process.

If you look at Firefox's Security Severity Rating doc: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security_Severity_Ratings/Client what you'll see is that vulnerabilities within the sandbox, and sandbox escapes, are both independently considered vulnerabilities. Chrome considers vulnerabilities in a similar manner.

Makes sense, thank you!

If only this attitude was more common. All security is, ultimately, multi-ply Swiss cheese and unknown unknowns. In that environment, patching holes in your cheese layers is a critical part of statistical quality control.

Semi-on topic. When will Anthropic make decisions on Claude Max for OSS maintainers? I would like to run this on my projects and some of my high-profile dependencies, but there was no update on the application.

It's important to fix vulnerabilities even if they are blocked by the sandbox, because attackers stockpile partial 0-days in the hopes of using them in case a complementary exploit is found later. i.e. a sandbox escape doesn't help you on its own, but it's remotely possible someone was using one in combination with one of these fixed bugs and has now been thwarted. I consider this a straightforward success for security triage and fixing.

I don't think it's appropriate to neg these vulnerabilities because another part of the system works. There are plenty of sandbox escapes. No one says don't fix the sandbox because you'll never get to the point of interrogation with the sandbox. Same here. Don't discount bugs just because a sandbox exists.

But doesn't this come from the company that said they had the "AI" write a compiler that can compile "linux" but couldn't compile a hello world in reality?

Requiring exploits is not how vulnerability research works, with or without AI. Vulnerability discovery and exploit development / weaponizing them are different things. Vendors have long since learned to take vuln reports, with our without demo exploits, seriously.

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