More like AI is much faster at finding obscure vulnerabilities, because it doesn’t get tired of digging into the mind-numbing details of human-generated spaghetti code. Give a human the same kind of task, and they would die of boredom 12 hours into it.
We’re entering an age where AI is quickly cleaning up the stupid security holes that have been created by decades of human mistakes, and will continue to be this way until increased AI security reviews will become more standard. The tribals wielding spears will continue to get shot by superior firepower until they adapt to the same weapons and protection themselves.
This example demonstrates my point though. It requires an extremely unusual system configuration that may or may not even exist in the real world it is so unusual. AI doesnt get tired, like you said, but its not about spaghetti code (both musl and openssh are gold-standard opposite of spaghetti code), its about trying every possible software combination in ways a human wouldnt bother.
It requires an extremely unusual system configuration that may or may not even exist in the real world it is so unusual.
You have to remember that the same AI agents finding the code are also able to exploit the code. So, if it’s some extremely rare race condition requiring some convoluted pattern, it’s still easy to exploit.
Yeah and this isn’t a new paradigm, in the sense that tools to find exploits have gotten better repeatedly and allowed those with enough knowledge to use the tools to find them, regardless of if they could manually craft the exploit themselves. There’s a multitude of bug bounties that have been claimed by those who knew how to let a reverse engineering tool like ghidra hammer away at something with variation for long enough. And the models are capable of novel exploits on their own, but generally they are just doing the same, hammering ghidra with an MCP at accelerated scale. So “only ai would have found this bug” is technically untrue and moot.
More like AI is much faster at finding obscure vulnerabilities, because it doesn’t get tired of digging into the mind-numbing details of human-generated spaghetti code. Give a human the same kind of task, and they would die of boredom 12 hours into it.
We’re entering an age where AI is quickly cleaning up the stupid security holes that have been created by decades of human mistakes, and will continue to be this way until increased AI security reviews will become more standard. The tribals wielding spears will continue to get shot by superior firepower until they adapt to the same weapons and protection themselves.
“Cleaning up” seems a little generous. It’s finding them, but someone still has to patch them.
Most vulnerability patches are a few lines of code. Finding it is the hard part.
Even then, the AI session that found it probably already has a solution to fix it.
This example demonstrates my point though. It requires an extremely unusual system configuration that may or may not even exist in the real world it is so unusual. AI doesnt get tired, like you said, but its not about spaghetti code (both musl and openssh are gold-standard opposite of spaghetti code), its about trying every possible software combination in ways a human wouldnt bother.
You have to remember that the same AI agents finding the code are also able to exploit the code. So, if it’s some extremely rare race condition requiring some convoluted pattern, it’s still easy to exploit.
Yeah and this isn’t a new paradigm, in the sense that tools to find exploits have gotten better repeatedly and allowed those with enough knowledge to use the tools to find them, regardless of if they could manually craft the exploit themselves. There’s a multitude of bug bounties that have been claimed by those who knew how to let a reverse engineering tool like ghidra hammer away at something with variation for long enough. And the models are capable of novel exploits on their own, but generally they are just doing the same, hammering ghidra with an MCP at accelerated scale. So “only ai would have found this bug” is technically untrue and moot.