Vulnerability reports are not special anymore
words.filippo.io
words.filippo.io
Occasionally I see real security researchers on HN complaining that no one takes the disclosure seriously, or that people reply immediately with a cease and desist. But from the receiving end it's just because the spam is unmanageable.
Again, the alternative might be shutting down the program entirely.
First question: Do you keep money for shit reports?
Well no, you have to pay it back like credit card validation. There is no pain for posting shit report just inconvenience. There is no legal way where you can keep the money.
I am not an accountant so ask some accountants why not.
If your disclosure otherwise meets all of the guidelines of the program, but is not eligible for a bounty, we may, in our sole discretion, award you a bounty of $1.
They already like blurring the lines by rejecting reports that have clear reproduction scripts, videos, demonstrable (but not critical) impact. They'll close it as "not a bug" but then also forbid disclosure and stonewall mediation requests. Reports are supposed to be kept private until the issue is fixed but the system gets abused to cover up issues long after they've been fixed.
In some cases I strongly suspect it's to evade liability for financial damages that their customers might've suffered. Platform mediation always takes their side and if you want to do what's right, you will get banned.
But do you know how many people are doing things that are even dumber right this very minute? I don't know either, but I'm sure it's larger than either of us would like to admit.
> chance of being arrested
Sometimes even when the testing has been completely offline - I know people who have downloaded some software, carried out testing against a local copy of it, and then faced legal threats when they tried to report serious security vulnerabilities to the vendor.
It's one of the reasons that some researchers don't bother trying to talk to the vendors and just go straight to full disclosure, or if they do report to vendors they do so anonymously. But if you have to pay, that's creating a link back to yourself which makes the latter much harder.
Sure - modern AI can figure that out, but I bet in a vast majority of cases they won't.
For a typical commercial entity? $0.05 is not a deterrent; the companies legal team is and has been for a decade.
Very few people are going to invest that much effort when they're trying to do the company that they're reporting to a favour.
It's hard to spot the stuff that actually matters.
> The attackers used a supply chain attack. The attackers accessed the build system belonging to the software company SolarWinds, possibly via SolarWinds's Microsoft Office 365 account, which had also been compromised at some point. SolarWinds was using build management and continuous integration server TeamCity provided by the Czech company JetBrains. In 2021 The New York Times stated that unknown parties apparently embedded malware in JetBrains' software and through this way compromised also SolarWinds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_federal_gov...
I don’t know what kind of software you write, how valuable your company’s infrastructure is, etc. But supply chain and insider threat in security/infrastructure is a big topic — that I’m sure they’re concerned about because that’s their area of responsibility.
Even if I’m personally sympathetic to not wanting to deal with the churn of dev dependency updates.
So far as I’m concerned the solution is to isolate everything as much as possible. I’d love to see something on the CVE classification side to also address the signal to noise problem but I don’t see it happening.
If I could filter out DoS CVEs‚ I would.
Ironically we'd probably need to run Dependabot itself in a mirrored environment since it too has external dependencies we'd probably not want to vet.
I do think external dependencies are among our biggest security threats though. It's so hard to vet them, and compliance basically comes down to "We trust the apache software foundation enough, and pyarrow is vital to our business, so we accept the risks", and then you lock versions and aren't the first to update except for vulnerabilities. Shadow AI is obviously the number one security threat right now, especially in enterprise with people who are very tech savvy. This makes dependencies so much worse though, because now everyone can (if their systems aren't locked down tight) do so many crazy things. Both with the "non-sanctioned" AI but also with the code it can generate for them.
Just updating everything is probably easier than assessing if it's possible to trigger an exploit with the way you use the package.
I do wonder how long it will take before an attack is developed by submitting a semi-genuine vulnerability, shortly followed by a ‘fix’ including malicious code.
I would challenge anyone proposing this to define more than one party doing security checks on packages to prove the point that many projects are waving their hands nebulously around saying "security vendors" and then YOLO'ing code into their codebase because they didn't here the muses wailing.
Alternatively from the other direction - Point to any dependency in your project. How can you get *POSITIVE SIGNAL* that security vendors _did_ look at it and okay it? How much scrutiny did they put into it? At what version did they last inspect it?
The other option is to simply ignore updates and do them on a schedule, e.g. once every 1-2 months.
Dependencies and supply chain attacks are probably the greatest risk to a lot of software orgs, as they run them across all their environments: Development (with secrets and other valuable artefacts on developer VMs), CI/CD pipelines which may have access tokens to production (and other) environments, and production itself.
Notably even security companies are being impacted by this[0]. The scale of these attacks has amplified quite significantly the past three years, but are not solely exclusive to the javascript ecosystem [1] or even just namesquatting/typosquatting [2].
The resolution is broader security awareness, "onion layered" security controls and implementing simple non-burden inducing processes and policies. Sometimes not updating (what was wrong with the previous version of a dependency if there was no immediate vulnerability or production issue caused by it?) or having a two week cool down for updates (which some supply chain tooling natively supports) can appease some security functions through clear communication of the supply chain risk etc.
If anyone has interest in courses aligned to your org on improving developer and broader engineering management awareness on this, e-mails in my profile :).
[0] - https://socket.dev/blog/ongoing-supply-chain-attack-targets-...
[1] - https://orca.security/resources/blog/hades-pypi-supply-chain...
[2] - https://checkmarx.com/zero-post/python-pypi-supply-chain-att...
> I do think external dependencies are among our biggest security threats though.
I know how they came about with this setup, but I think that's the wrong way of approaching the problem.
Their problem is legacy and trickle-in features in an otherwise unmaintainable code.
With AI, they can rewrite their software to minimize dependencies and in general reduce the attack surface by allowing the business to automate more on their own.
But it requires bold management decisions and people in position of authority that can pick the right battles for the advancement of their careers.
Or do you just trust the AI that was trained on a lot of bogus code?
That being said, our current strategy is more along the lines of building thind within standard libraries. We really wanted to adopt Go company wide, but it's proven impossible for non-SWE staff to use AI to create their projects in anything but Python. So instead we've created AI configurations that know our security policies, the tools we want them to use and we've setup security policies which won't even allow you to run a Python executionable inside a virtual environment unless your devices is sepcifically allowed to do so in that specific folder. Similarily we've completely limited what VSCode extensions they can use down to the named folder version. Which sort of sucks, and I doubt a lot of it would be possible if it wasn't because the c-levels are personally liable for security under EU law.
We'll see what happens after september when the summer holidays are over and the real token cost of AI will kick in.
This is the beginning and end of reasonable security. This is what it's always about, and if you go beyond it, you risk practicing art for the sake of art, at the expense of customers and other stakeholders.
Security is about understanding and managing risk. Not about achieving some mathematical perfection (which is actually only achievable by making your system an inert piece of rock, but people realize that way too late, after piling on way too many pointless "security improvements").
From the perspective of big corporate security - developers are a wild nuisance who file the lions share of the tickets and soak up an inordinate amount of resources. Being able to at least explain to them that you understand their objectives and are not overrequesting just for the sake of overrequesting goes a long way.
Even worse, it incentivizes randomly updating dependencies, which is what actually allows supply chain attacks.
And the money wasted on the security theatre around this outdated concept is astonishing.
Ok. Hacking me by changing the input to my Jekyll rather involves being on the other side of the airtight hatch.
(a) add a new function that does regular expressions searching / matching with a resource checker (eg a timer);
(b) write a local linter that reports an error for any use of the builtin regular expression tools;
(c) fix all the lint warnings;
(d) commit the linter.
e.g. in cPython, until 3.11, there was no support for atomic grouping (roughly translation: "never backtrack inside of this expression"). There is little useful advice a linter can give, if there is no predictable-runtime way to express what you want within a single match step, because you really do want to unwind the stack and check for repeats (just without any of the exponential runtime stuff, please).
[1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/328376/why-does-sta...
And to be honest, even if the regex is trusted (came from a developer) and the data as well (something predictable and structured) we are still not protected from the developer using extremely stupid regex and breaking everything
And your ISO etc certificates make this CVE mandatory priority 1 action point
I have already avoided having to evaluate whether I am affected by some issue because I added patches at startup that crash before certain unused-yet-installed modules are to be loaded. Also, for those Python packages that still have a pure version that defers to stdlib and a separate muh-performance binary option with statically linked dependencies, I can generally just install the former and skip the version bumps for dependencies. The performance advantage may be negligible or negative outside of benchmarking 100k calls.. of code actually called 11 times a day, on a non-critical path.
(besides cve, nist, et al drop in criteria) searching for an indepth analisys, you find one million (after scrolling the Ai summary) results that are either copy-pastrle or Ai rewording of the cve announcement.
...and don't get me started on the proofs that stop after smelling the attack vector. you can't evaluate if your setup is DoSable at most or full remote shell.
there's still tons of good analisys and reports. but the noise....
I still check the spam folder for legitimate emails, but so far there haven't been any false positives.
Also people ironically just DGAF that much. The last actual bad exploit was log4shell in java, which given how it was introduced (i.e someone purposefully at Apache made it so a log statement can execute code, and nobody questioned it before pushing it to prod), should have been the signal for everyone to completely remove all Apache libraries from their services, but yet all the software is still being used.
I don't think that is unique to the LLM era. The company I work for has been getting some form of spam vulnerability reports years before LLMs were a thing. Often similar to what you mention about 'bad CSS'.
Maybe the volume has increased a bit, but we've added in a filtering solution and I'm more distant from the reports now, so hard to be sure.
Right, what I'm saying is that letting those bugs go to full disclosure (aka being filed as public issues, like every other bug) would have been a significant damage to user safety a year ago, and it's not anymore.
Hopefully at the end of this decade, a ton of software practices have been overhauled to eliminate classes of problems. Memory-safe language use is a great start - but it’d be great to see innovation in checking for TOCTOU problems, improper/missing authn & authz, and many others.
This is an engineering problem. It won’t be solved by models that “only do dumb shit 1/10th as often, only 0.01% of the time now not 0.1%!” It won’t be solved by adding more models to do even more double-checking before and after the work. It won’t be solved by hoping humans catch it in review. It isn’t solvable by adding outer loops of any sort - though we may get close. To truly solve this will take serious CS research.
Personally i have some doubts, a lot of research has gone into the idea without much to show for it, but its a very reasonable research area.
But yeah, writing specs is usually harder than reviewing the code 4 times :)
See WPA2 KRACK, you could've had a formally verified WPA2 implementation and it still would've been exploitable because the flaw was the specification itself.
Part of what the research shows is that correctness-by-proof has a cost in developer effort.
If there really is a vulnerability-apocalypse due to AI, and it's not just a different flavour of AI hype, the cost of having insecure software will rise to the point that the cost of dealing with insecure or incorrect code at time of creation becomes less than the cost of ignoring it until it blows up.
I doubt it'll rise so much that we'll want to face the cost of behaviour proofs for much code at all, but it's quite possible it'll rise enough that we want to do things like prove that indices are in bounds, at compile time, so vector accesses can skip checks without compromising safety.
The issue is how to design a language that restricts programmers in a way you can prove everything you care for on their programs, and still don't make life of programmers unbearably difficult, because the language allows them nothing.
Especially since the world isn't Dilbert where your boss goes "oh, authz? lol nah, just yolo it" and you go "dangit, alright boss". Instead, security requires eternal vigilance and zero missteps along the thousands a project takes in its lifetime.
I think there's a reason HNers who pitch this idea never give any concrete examples of entailments of their proposal: it doesn't even sound good superficially. e.g. How this actually changes security issues. In fact it just sounds even more convenient to blame engineers.
Already today, in my experience, widespread models like Claude 4.6 or 4.8 can quite reliably find some concurrency bugs that are easily missed by humans.
Some.
In software & in security, 99% is a failing grade.
So is 99.99%, so is 99.999%, and any other amount less than 100%. It’s not enough to point 5 LLMs at it and it’s not enough to point 500 LLMs at it.
The field needs to seek deterministic & comprehensive solutions to whole problem classes.
And most "memory safe" languages are not all that memory safe. Or they need escape hooks.
EDIT: To be clear it's not AT ALL black and white. You have drunken too much of the type safety kool-aid.
Maybe now you need a better criteria than your previous failure / success_100%_infiniteCost to observe and understand the the world
People have been doing great research with formal methods, dependent types etc. Disciplining ourselves to truly write and understand code, using the best in math and PL theory (FP and type theory etc) is the only way forward in my opinion. We have to make correctness a value and goal, or else we will keep spinning off into psychosis and the corruption of truth.
The resources to find security bugs should be weighed against the impact of them being found & exploited by bad actors, not weighed against spending those resources on other things. (And small/simple products won’t suffer as much if a problem is found, so those cases justify smaller security investments)
I currently have two reports (one RCE on a famous OSS ML platform, one cluster take over on a k8s related projects), both are more than 2 months old without as much as an “F you, get lost”. Just got ignored and ghosted, which hurts a lot, because I spent a lot of time finding, and verifying these (all reports with poc and patch). BUT I understand why it’s happening, because I’m also on the receiving end.
security@ and VDPs have always received BS reports and beg-bounties, but boy oh boy, these days we have two people spending 3-4 days a week sifting through this constant flood of garbage compared to 2-3 tears ago where 1 person could triage the inbox and VDP in a day’s work max, which would’ve been considered very busy. Unfortunately we can’t just shutdown the programs or the mailbox because 1. We do occasionally get important and great stuff that actually matters, and 2. We’re a critical infra company and can’t ignore anything really.
The signal to noise ratio is almost zero, but the “what if” is keeping us swimming through this unending river of garbage and burning us out.
Overall, chaotic mess on both sides.
Ending on a doom-and-gloom note: there will be a reckoning.
(Don’t take the note too seriously though, I’m a SecEng, so I have a built-in doom multiplier lol)
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
AI vulnerability analysis is going to find something, it will be reported by a researcher and ignored as chaff, and then separately, later, someone will build it into an exploit and compromise a piece of critical national infrastructure
Ideally the reports would also be coming in in the same structured format.
Having seen the other side of a security inbox I totally get it, and fortunately I was able to get it re-opened via backchannels. I think the future of bug reporting will run almost exclusively on reputation and connections.
Further, the fact that bugs are so easy to find by LLMs means there is strong incentives to find ways to minimize creating bugs in the first place. That could be new or better languages, less 3rd party dependencies, more vetted code, better linters, better fuzzers, whatever. The point the new reality of bugs being easy to find will, actually must, lead to less bugs eventually because the world can't function with easy to find bugs.
Especially if you use AI, let's say you have it implement a feature and then change your mind. In my experience AI makes as many if not more bugs than a human.
I think we're at the point that the best LLMs can indeed write software that's far more secure than your average programmer. Partly because the average is so terrible.
I find that often bugs will be created when using an LLM, like others have said. Saying that this can then be fixed by identifying all the bugs created by an LLM with an LLM doesnt guarantee another bug is not introduced when the LLM is addressing the initial problem.
Also, what if the LLM has a blind spot. They certainly also could be incapable of finding or fixing a bug. They dont pass any benchmark at 100% right now. Also also, guaranteeing there are no bugs in your code is like saying you have 100% test coverage, all of the tests pass, and they are written perfectly. Saying that you can simply identify and fix the bugs also assumes there is enough time and energy to find all of the bugs that exist within a project and then to address them. Even LLMs use time and energy. In a sufficiently complex system that is certainly wishful thinking.
Considering the size and complexity of a lot of modern software (like web browsers, 3d modelling software, game engines, etc.) software is just too complex to not have bugs even when created and managed by LLMs.
There will continue to be bugs in code and we will simply have to live with the fact that LLMs make it easier to exploit computer systems. I mean consider a hardware bug like Spectre [0]. If bugs like this become easier to find does that mean our existing hardware will just become obsolete more quickly? that type of problem can be addressed, but at quite a high cost.
Not sure what all of this means for the future.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_%28security_vulnerabil...
Read what wrote, I didn't say your program will be bug free. I said, if the LLM can trivally find the bug it will. If it can't then we're at worst, back to the state of before LLMs could find bugs, but likely much better since we fixed so many of them
So, the fact that LLMs can trivially find bugs is enough to get the bugs fixed.
You, and several others, seemed to think I was saying LLMs would fix all the bugs. I never said that. I said they'd help. Finding them is help. Writing a possible fix is often help. Writing a possible fix and seeing if they can detect a bug after the fix is applied is also help. Automating the entire things and letting LLMs fix them without review is likely not help.
I agree that LLMs make finding bugs take far less time and energy. I also agree that this should mean in the long run there are less trivial to find bugs IF everyone adopts the usage of LLMs while writing and reviewing code.
It does also seem possible that LLMs are better at finding bugs than fixing them.
This gets worse if you factor in different harnesses built for the task, and future model updates
Sure, things will get calmer than they are now, but shipping without bugs someone else considers trivial will still require more effort than most are willing to invest
Then a year or two later they'd repeat the operation and they'd find about the same amount of same types of bugs. In many occasions in code that had been in place in the previous round and had remained essentially untouched.
Paraphrasing what the Gruqg has quipped - a large piece of software has infinity bugs. Infinity minus N is still infinity.
0: Discovery rate with regards to the time spent looking for bugs. LLM-powered bug hunting has amped up the speed with which code bases can be investigated.
Many of the bugs we are finding in projects like curl are 20 years old - once they are fixed they are fixed and so hopefully we get all those 1-20 year old problems fixed and future scans only find new problems which is itself a big improvement in the rate. I agree that we will never reach a point where there are no bugs introduced, but we should strive to fix them faster.
Are you making a counterpoint that the reports are so good and must all be addresses, but the problem is "llm finding all the bugs" so fast us poor slow humana cannot keep up?
because if so, i suggest you write a new article.
my brother in christ, I hope you're actually trying to be funny here.
99 little bugs
take one down, patch it around
105 little bugs in the code...
If all LLM reports were accurate, they'd be of any value. However, that's not what is happening. If you have even mentioned something about a bug bounty anywhere, waves of slop peddlers will flood you with fake reports marking every minor bug as a critical problem, hoping to catch a handful of dollars in the process.
These models do find some problems and may even provide decent suggestions to fix them (though they really want to add code above anything else, quickly leading to spaghetti if you accept it all). That's not the issue at the moment, and as long as people try to incentivize people to report bugs, the issue will remain.
I do expect this to be temporary, though. Not because LLMs will fix all the bugs, but because the flood of slop will shut down most public bug bounties.
But the last couple of decades have shown us that huge numbers of developers aren't even following basic and free secure development practices, let alone pouring money into expensive scanning tools.
I mean, we've had tooling like fuzzers available for a very long time, and most devs haven't run one against their software ever, let alone before each release.
It's the human factor I think will keep this a problem essentially-forever.
> A requirement for staying sane while working in public as an open source maintainer is realizing that every issue, PR, and piece of feedback is a present, not an obligation. You can accept it, ignore it, and use it partially or not at all.
> Except…
> For years, as lead of the Go Security team at the time, I’ve told new team members that it doesn’t apply to vulnerability reports. No, vulnerability reports are special. Security researchers are doing us a favor by reporting things confidentially instead of doing full disclosure, so we owe them something, which is not true of regular issues opened on the issue tracker.
[...]
> It’s 2026 and none of the premises are true anymore.
I respectfully disagree.
The premise is absolutely still true: if someone discovers a critical, exploitable vulnerability in your software, the impact and tradeoffs are exactly the same as they were before LLMs started finding bugs. There are just more of them now, so they're easier to come by.
But that won't last forever, either. As LLMs find increasingly difficult-to-find vulnerabilities, there will be fewer of them to report. This is just chugging through the backlog.
All of that said, I don't think finding vulnerabilities has really been the difficult security problem for most companies (or open source projects). The difficult problem is dedicating resources to fixing those vulnerabilities instead of building software, products, and/or infrastructure that people want. That problem is absolutely still here today, but I'm optimistic that agentic security developers will be able to take the burden off of development teams in the near future.
For tokens, of course.
I think your logic is partly correct but the fact that the same LLMs are allowing an exponential increase in insecure code generated is a counterbalancing point. I do not think this phenomena will slow down.
I think the point is those issues are now easily discoverable and are nearly public because of it.
That is not my experience at all. People will continue to high-volume spam intended behaviour as if it is a bug.
There will be fewer reports that matter as you fix things - but the volume of reports will either stay steady or go up. Making it harder to even notice the ones that matter.
We’ve always been able to find heaps, we’ve just never had the right structures to put in the effort and renumerate people for looking (even if they don’t find anything).
I filed a report, they marked it as 'informative' and thanked me, recommended I keep looking for more vulnerabilities, but no payment at all; they said I had to be able to demonstrate major disruption of service... Which I presume is illegal. I literally showed them all the ingredients of the attack, the exact curl commands, payloads, the exact response delay could be easily be verified; you could see the server response slowing down proportional to the degree of nesting in the payload. I could execute it without authentication too; so it was essentially certain that the attack could be scaled but they made it impossible to get a reward.
The hardest part was writing the report which took several hours.
So yeah, 30 minutes of looking for a vulnerability, no prior experience in security research, first project I looked into on Hacker One, ever... A company in crypto sector which is a major target of hackers and takes security relatively seriously.
Imagine how insecure most software is! Imagine how bad most vibe-coded software is especially! Companies might as well run their servers directly inside Kim Jong Un's data center in North Korea.
North Korean hackers probably have a dashboard which shows more detailed and accurate platform analytics than what the founders of the company can see.
One flipside to this is that, because many of these bugs are "shallow" to LLMs, it's actually easier than ever to moderate the worst participants in your vulnerability program -- if someone sends you slop, you can just ban them and wait for the next, better orchestrated LLM to send you a better report for the same vulnerability.
I wonder what the metrics are. Also, not "anyone", just the affordable.
> But give it 1-3 months and the open models will catch up.
I wish that this would stopped being thrown around, what is this timeline based on? How good is your open model from between March and May?
Also, having read "Gödel, Escher, Bach" I know that the hare never catches up with the turtle.
The _demonstration_ of security impact through vulnerability reports was special. The automation of “demonstration of impact” with AI isn’t that at all. The last mile is human and always was. This isn’t to say it won’t change in the future, but that’s a fact of where we are now.
Vulnerability reports aren’t special anymore. They never were. It was the impact, the demonstration, the communication that was special.
When you realize that this is being written from the perspective of someone who does vulnerability reporting in a professional capacity, you’ll connect the dots. We took care to be kind and succinct because for many of us, we learned our skills from being on the development side of things first.
Vulnerability reports aren’t special anymore. The only ones that felt special were the ones with human touch, the ones doing their job as an adversarial thinker, and taking the care to understand that net positive outcomes require coordination even if both parties don’t see eye to eye.
Nothing has changed. It never was. You’re just inundated with AI slop; which as a practitioner who uses AI regularly I can say with absolute confidence. The end result is the same, the volume is increased, but the special thing was never the report itself.
Finding a vulnerability was always the easy but high toil part. It was the care to communicate succinctly and be invested in the outcome that was special.
Godspeed.
I’ve been screaming this from the rooftops. Impact is what was always important. No one is going to take down prod to do an emergency patch on an RCE that COULD NEVER ACTUALLY BE EXPLOITED.
I feel like we’re witnessing the result of multiple roles suddenly becoming security aware but not having the background or understanding to make any sense of it.
If you aren't careful, that is how you get this security theater.
This entire demeanor of the way people and ai people talk about software and technical people is getting absurd and simply unprofessional. It is as if we stopped being adults.
Right now the rate of signal is high, and the ratio of noise is proportionally high. But it seems like everyone expects the signal to eventually plateau or sharply decline. Almost as if there is a finite supply of "low hanging fruit" for shallow scanning machines to easily discover, and then there will be some kind of new world that follows where only truly difficult problems emerge.
But eventually the question then becomes why even bother with Rust or any other silly borrow checking ideas if we can use more enjoyable programming languages with LLM side-kicks to catch security vulnerabilities on the front side of the development workflow?
IT seems to me if we exhaust all the extant security vulnerabilities to a calculus that asymptotically goes to infinitesimal zeroness, then... the only trick remaining is to scan code before it becomes vulnerable.
This of course made vulnerability researchers seethe worse than aggrieved Redditors.
It turns out he was right all along.
The author also gets it wrong by assuming that regular bug reporters are not "providing a service". They are.
When I wrote up a bug report, I made sure it's thorough with detailed steps to reproduce. It takes a lot of time and I've done it professionally for projects you've absolutely heard of.
Having said that, getting them ignored repeatedly and — even worse — having my detailed PRs rejected, sometimes within minutes, as if I'm some ignorant luser is why I don't do it anymore. My time is more valuable than your hubris.
A lot of open source developers have their heads so far up their own asses they forgot that it takes a community for projects to be successful.
Our solution was to build a tool that uses LLMs to assess the report before it gets to us. Honestly I wish we didn’t have to do this but it works and has really allowed us to spend our time on the actual good reports. (Feel free to check it out at fortworx.com if you want)
> The security researchers are not special, the insight and confidentiality are
vs
> The bottleneck now is not finding potential issues but assessing which ones are real. Unless there’s already a trust relationship, external researchers can’t meaningfully contribute
My take-away from this is that the researchers were special all along and you should probably be building a trust relationship with them.
Despite what I want to believe about tech being a meritocracy, the reality is that trust plays an extremely important role and without it we risk a collapse of our open source software ecosystem.
One of my biggest criticisms of AI is the trust vacuum within which it operates
Is this even a question? You triage and fix the vulnerability just like any other one. Are truths spoken by folks one dislikes — even for perfectly valid reasons — any less true?
The only way I can imagine this somehow applying is if someone has a habit of reporting vulnerabilities which do not exist, or of exaggerating their severity. Is crying wolf a CoC violation? If so, then I can imagine that particular sort of bad behaviour justifying some consideration before acting on a report.
No they are not. Everything else can be safely ignored. The author is suffering from AI psychosis and needs to get some help.
I don't think the gift analogy works well. In most cultures, turning down or even ignoring a gift is considered anywhere from impolite to hugely offensive. But that's the opposite of open source: there's nothing wrong with requesting changes to a PR or even closing it.
The inbound stuff we get through the vulnerability e-mail is pretty much exclusively spam. Then they start e-mailing random people of the company they can find to get through, and in the end it's still spam.
> Ultimately, it all stems from our responsibility to our users. The security researchers are not special, the insight and confidentiality are, and we need them to keep our users safe. Ignoring a security report communicates you don’t care about users’ security, and it’s rightly a reason for shame.
100%. This was always true and I still think it is. LLMs don't change anything. At most they shift the balance and force a temporary compromise.
> LLMs are as good as almost any security researcher
This statement is extremely dependent on the definition of a security researcher. It might hold if you consider anyone with a HackerOne account, but if you restrict the definition to people who actually put in some effort, it's just not true. LLMs can find some real vulnerabilities, yes, but they also spew unprecedented volumes of garbage that an expert can immediately recognize as such.
> The insight is not scarce and precious anymore. The bottleneck now is not finding potential issues but assessing which ones are real.
Assessing which ones are real should be part of the insight. Real researchers will not submit 150 pages of spam, and three real bugs hidden in 150 pages of spam are not insight. In most cases a researcher will spend significant effort on triage before submitting anything, and an LLM still cannot do that reliably.
> Confidentiality, embargoes, and coordination also don’t matter nearly as much as they used to.
I'd argue these now matter more: the one thing LLMs do seem to do fairly well is figure out specific things based on sufficient information and a scope that's limited enough. So a plain commit containing a security fix is now much easier and cheaper to turn into an exploit than it was before.
> The years of vulnerability reports being special might be over, as weird and uncomfortable as that feels.
I'd hope not. Bug bounties might be over unless someone can figure out the spam problem, but disclosure programs that don't offer monetary incentives are probably just going through a tough period that will eventually calm down as the operators of LLMs realize the costs and do the math.
Unreliable reports have always been an issue and will remain one, LLMs or no. When it gets worse, like in the current influx of LLM-generated reports, the focus should be on identifying reliable researchers, building relationships, and providing guidance on how they can make the reports easier to triage.
Researchers are not special, but the insight they can provide totally is. LLMs might force everyone to make better use of that insight, instead of just consuming bug reports and drowning in triage.
[1] https://groups.google.com/g/golang-announce/search?q=juho
> We're keeping our vulnerability disclosure program open - because even though they are rare, the genuine critical reports we receive, in amongst the noise, are still highly valuable. I don't think we're at the stage yet where finding those issues is a purely mechanical process; persistent, imaginative researchers still make a contribution to the process by finding things that LLMs by themselves, so far, haven't.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7475447...
> Still on Hacker News, Juho Forsén, one of the most prolific reporters of Go security issues, wrote a long interesting comment that makes the argument that instead we should lean harder into trust relationships with individual researchers. It'd certainly be worth it with Juho, in retrospect, but it's unclear if it would pay off often enough, in the same way that training new contributors who might leave the project in a month or two is not always worth it.
It’s tough staying motivated on a craft when an AI is nearly as good as you. Chess players manage to do it at least.
The 5 on earth still getting paid to play chess?
but like, if you mean literally "someone gave them money and they played a game of chess", the number becomes much bigger. Chess coaches, streamers, club instructors, exhibition players, league players, camp counselors, and titled players receiving appearance fees, etc. All told, you're looking at ten's of thousands across the world.
It’s like most of art, writing, and sports. The only way to make money is by becoming a teacher.
Oh really? If LLMs were as good as almost any security researcher then you wouldn't be getting flooded by bullshit reports from them. You'd be receiving legitimate reports instead.
My sweet summer child, the "profession" will become an agent managers talk directly to, like many other professions.
What is this, rage bait? It's bullshit, and insulting to actual security researchers.
That might be true for low-effort vulnerabilities and fake security researchers, but the real security researchers are far from being replaced by LLMs.