cURL removes bug bounties

https://etn.se/index.php/nyheter/72808-curl-removes-bug-bounties.html

by jnord • 6 months ago

435 264 6 months ago

etn.se

eknkc• 6 months ago

A list of the slop if anyone is interested:

https://gist.github.com/bagder/07f7581f6e3d78ef37dfbfc81fd1d...

shusaku• 6 months ago

To replicate the issue, I have searched in the Bard about this vulnerability.

Seeing Bard mentioned as an LLM takes me back :)

golem142• 6 months ago

I looked at two reports, and I can’t tell if the reports are directly from an ai or some very junior student not really understanding security. LLms to me sound generally more convincing.

mirekrusin• 6 months ago

Some (most?) are llm chat copy paste addressing non existing users in conversations like [0] - what a waste of time.

[0] https://hackerone.com/reports/2298307

plastic0412• 6 months ago

In the second report, Daniel greeted the slopper very kindly and tried to start a conversation with them. But the slopper calls him by the completely wrong name. And this was December 2023. It must have been extremely tiring.

johncoltrane• 6 months ago

slopper

First new word of 2026. Thank you.

TeMPOraL8• 6 months ago

December 2023... that was early AI era. Had to double-check the dates actually, because I misremembered the release date of GPT-4 as being in 2024; turns out it was in 2023, and that was when LLMs first became remotely useful for even this kind of slop.

ValentineC• 6 months ago

This (manual?) addition in the second report [1] likely gives an idea as to the reporter's mastery of English and ability to proofread before spamming out slop:

Sorry that I'm replying to other triager of other program, so it's mistake went in flow

I think it would be really interesting if someone at HackerOne did a dive into the demographic of many of the banned posters.

[1] https://hackerone.com/reports/2298307#activity-25314164

OsrsNeedsf2P• 6 months ago

Honestly infuriating to read. I'm so surprised cURL put up with this for so long

worldsavior• 6 months ago

All of those reports are clearly AI and it's weird seeing the staff not recognizing it as AI and being serious.

ares6235• 6 months ago

Orc, meet hobbits.

potatoproduct2• 6 months ago

I thought the same, except I realised some of the reports were submitted back in 2023 before AI slop exploded.

ChrisRR• 6 months ago

They're very clearly AI when you're told that it's a list of AI. But when you're given a mixed list of AI and genuine reports, I bet it's not so simple and very time consuming

dlcarrier4• 6 months ago

An entry fee that is reimbursed if the bug turns out to matter would stop this, real quick.

Then again, I once submitted a bug report to my bank, because the login method could be switched from password+pin to pin only, when not logged in, and they closed it as "works as intended", because they had decided that an optional password was more convenient than a required password. (And that's not even getting into the difference between real two-factor authentication the some-factor one-and-a-half-times they had implemented by adding a PIN to a password login.) I've since learned that anything heavily regulated like hospitals and banks will have security procedures catering to compliance, not actual security.

Assuming the host of the bug bounty program is operating in good faith, adding some kind of barrier to entry or punishment for untested entries will weed out submitters acting in bad faith.

gamer191• 6 months ago

Agreed, although the reimbursement should be based on whether a reasonable person could consider that to be a vulnerability. Often it’s tricky for outsiders to tell whether a behaviour is expected or a vulnerability

dlcarrier4• 6 months ago

Yeah, the reimbursement would need to be for a good-faith submission worth considering, even if it wasn't actionable.

fredrikholm• 6 months ago

An entry fee that is reimbursed if the bug turns out to matter would stop this, real quick.

I refer to this as the Notion-to-Confluence cost border.

When Notion first came out, it was snappy and easy to use. Creating a page being essentially free of effort, you very quickly had thousands of them, mostly useless.

Confluence, at least in west EU, is offensively slow. The thought of adding a page is sufficiently demoralizing that it's easier to update an existing page and save yourself minutes of request time outs. Consequently, there's some ~20 pages even in large companies.

I'm not saying that sleep(15 * SECOND) is the way to counter, but once something becomes very easy to do at scale, it explodes to the point where the original utility is now lost in a sea of noise.

teekert2• 6 months ago

It’s strange how sensitive humans are to these sort of relative perceived efforts. Having a charged, cordless vacuum cleaner ready to go and take around the house has also changed our vacuuming game. Because carrying a big unwieldy vacuum cleaner and needing to find a power socket at every location just feels like much more effort. Even though it really isn't.

jraph2• 6 months ago

Consequently, there's some ~20 pages even in large companies.

As someone working on Confluence to XWiki migration tools, I wish this was remotely true, my life would be way easier (and probably more boring :-)).

arionmiles2• 6 months ago

I find this to be a very amusing critique. In my experience, Notion (when I stopped using it 3 years ago) was slow as molasses. Slow to load, slow to update. In comparison, at work, I almost exclusively favor Confluence Cloud. It's very responsive for me.

We have tons of Confluence wikis, updated frequently.

TeMPOraL8• 6 months ago

The term I know / used for this is "trivial inconveniences", via an old article of Scott Alexander[0].

The quote from example from early in the article stuck with me for years:

Think about this for a second. The human longing for freedom of information is a terrible and wonderful thing. It delineates a pivotal difference between mental emancipation and slavery. It has launched protests, rebellions, and revolutions. Thousands have devoted their lives to it, thousands of others have even died for it. And it can be stopped dead in its tracks by requiring people to search for "how to set up proxy" before viewing their anti-government website.

(Now this is more poetic, but I suppose the much more insightful example that also stuck with me is given later - companies enticing you to buy by offering free money, knowing well that most customers can't be arsed to fill out a form to actually get that money.)

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...

capitainenemo3• 6 months ago

I suspect that applies specifically to their cloud rewrite which was apparently a bloat of JS libs and hundreds of requests even by Atlassian standards. The on-prem self-host Confluence I've used is still pretty snappy and pleasant to use and without throwing an absurd amount of resources at it. We do have quite a lot of actually-useful documentation in it.

That said, Atlassian is busy relentlessly raising the price for self-host to push people into their cloud roach motel, so we'll probably be on some alternative (either FOSS or commercial, but self-host) soon too.

nospice2• 6 months ago

An entry fee that is reimbursed if the bug turns out to matter would stop this, real quick.

The problem is that bug bounty slop works. A lot of companies with second-tier bug bounties outsource triage to contractors (there's an entire industry built around that). If a report looks plausible, the contractor files a bug. The engineers who receive the report are often not qualified to debate exploitability, so they just make the suggested fix and move on. The reporter gets credit or a token payout. Everyone is happy.

Unless you have a top-notch security team with a lot of time on their hands, pushing back is not in your interest. If you keep getting into fights with reporters, you'll eventually get it wrong and you're gonna get derided on HN and get headlines about how you don't take security seriously.

In this model, it doesn't matter if you require a deposit, because on average, bogus reports still pay off. You also create an interesting problem that a sketchy vendor can hold the reporter's money hostage if the reporter doesn't agree to unreasonable terms.

zrm• 6 months ago

Triage gets outsourced because the quality of reports is low.

If filing a bad report costs money, low quality reports go down. Meanwhile anyone still doing it is funding your top notch security team because then they can thoroughly investigate the report and if it turns out to be nothing then the reporter ends up paying them for their time.

notpushkin• 6 months ago

I don’t think it works for curl though. You would guess that sloperators would figure out that their reports aren’t going through with curl specifically (because, well, people are actually looking into them and can call bullshit), and move on.

For some reason they either didn’t notice (e.g. there’s just too many people trying to get in on it), or did notice, but decided they don’t care. Deposit should help here: companies probably will not do it, so when you see a project requires a deposit, you’ll probably stop and think about it.

saghm• 6 months ago

That anecdote is hilarious and scary in equal measures. Optional passwords are certainly more convenient than required ones, but so are optional PINs. The most convenient UX would be never needing to log in at all! Unless you find it inconvenient for others to have access to your bank account of course

sersi• 6 months ago

I really hate the current trend of not having passwords. For example perplexity doesn't have a password, just an email verification to login.

duskdozer3• 6 months ago

And the counter where the most secure system never allows anyone to log in ever

bawolff11• 6 months ago

Bug bounties often involve a lot of risk for submitters. Often the person reading the report doesn't know that much and misinterprets it. Often rules are unclear about what sort of reports are wanted. A pay to enter would increase that risk.

Honestly bug bounties are kind of miserable for both sides. I've worked on the recieving side of bug bounty programs. You wouldnt believe the shit that is submitted. This was before AI and it was significant work to sort through, i can only imagine what its like now. On the other hand for a submitter, you are essentially working on spec with no garuntee your work is going to be evaluated fairly. Even if it is, you are rolling the dice that your report is not a duplicate of an issue reported 10 years ago that the company just doesn't feel like fixing.

ANarrativeApe• 6 months ago

Pay to enter would increase the risk of submitting a bug report. However, if the submission fees were added to the bounty payable, then the risk reward changes in favour of the submitter of genuine bugs. You could even have refund the submission fee in the case of a good faith non bug submission. A little game theory can go a long way in improving the bug bounty system...

eterm• 6 months ago

Indeed, increasing the incentive for companies to reject ( and then sometimes silently fix anyway ) even the valid reports would only increase further misery for everyone.

skirge2• 6 months ago

Real risk is missed security issue

entuno4• 6 months ago

Vulnerability disclosure is general is just miserable. Before all the bug bounty issues it was pretty common to:

* Spend ages trying to find someone to submit a report to.

* Waste a whole load of time fighting through the generic contact and support desks to try and get your report to someone who understood it.

* Get completely ignored by the developers.

* Spend time reporting a bug only for them to silently fix it without even bothering to respond to you, let alone acknowledge you.

* Get legal threats for making a good-faith bug report, even if you found it in an locally deployed instance of the software.

* Get called a black hat and more legal threats when you give up and just go down the full disclosure route.

freedomben• 6 months ago

Indeed. I've also gotten a lot of "Hey I found a super critical security bug that makes your system ass, but if you pay me first I'll tell you what it is" types of submissions. Sometimes it's a hybrid, like something semi-legitimate but weak that they disclose up front, closing with a "and I've got another one that's juicy but you have to pay me first to hear it".

Oh and then of course there is the flood of people who just scanned our infra with Nessus and screenshotted part of the report (often with important details blacked out so we can't see them unless we pay).

As someone who has been on both sides of it as well, it just feels like everything is terrible

dmurray• 6 months ago

cURL would operate such a program in good faith, and quickly earn the trust of the people who submit the kind of bug reports cURL values.

Your bank would not. Nor would mine, or most retail banks.

If the upfront cost would genuinely put off potential submitters, a cottage industry would spring up of hackers who would front you the money in return for a cut if your bug looked good. If that seems gross, it's really not - they end up doing bug triage for the project, which is something any software company would be happy to pay people for.

sudahtigabulan• 6 months ago

I've since learned that anything heavily regulated like hospitals and banks will have security procedures catering to compliance, not actual security.

Sadly, yeah. And will do anything only if they believe they can actually be caught.

An EU-wide bank I used to be customer of until recently, supported login with Qualified Electronic Signatures, but only if your dongle supports... SHA-1. Mine didn't. It's been deprecated at least a decade ago.

A government-certified identity provider made software that supposedly allowed you to have multiple such electronic signatures plugged in, presenting them in a list, but if one of them happened to be a YubiKey... crash. YubiKey conforms to the same standard as the PIV modules they sold, but the developers made some assumptions beyond the standard. I just wanted their software not to crash while my YubiKey is plugged in. I reported it, and they replied that it's not their problem.

burnt-resistor3• 6 months ago

Name and shame, and give them a trial by media.

laserbeam• 6 months ago

For weak bank logins, my guess is that reimbursing all account takeovers is cheaper than having a complex login process that would scare away non-technical customers. Or, well, I could see myself making that decision if I were more versed in finance than in computer science and I had a reasonable risk assessment in front of me to tell me how many account takeovers happen.

dlcarrier4• 6 months ago

Banks aren't even liable for losses from account takeovers, at least if their system is compliant, regardless of whether that makes it secure. Their biggest incentive is customer satisfaction, which fraud does hurt.

It's credit cards that have to reimburse for fraud, but they charge the merchant for it, plus fees, so they have absolutely no incentive to prevent fraud, if not an incentive to outright encourage fraud. That would explain why their implementation of the already compromised EMV was further nerfed by a lack of a PIN in the US.

icar• 6 months ago

I've since learned that anything heavily regulated like hospitals and banks will have security procedures catering to compliance, not actual security.

I personally came to that conclusion thanks to the GrapheneOS situation regarding device attestation. Insecure devices get full features from some apps because they are certified, although they cite security, while GrapheneOS get half featured apps because it's "insecure" (read, doesn't have the Google certification, but are actually the most secure devices you can get, worldwide)

cynicalsecurity• 6 months ago

It's not about securing your device from external threats or bad actors; it's about securing the device from you.

duxup• 6 months ago

Are bug reports a 100% sure black and white thing?

Could people who think they found a bug but not sure be turned off by the up front cost / risk of finding out they are wrong or not technically finding a bug?

entuno4• 6 months ago

A problem with this approach is that one of the key functions of a bug bounty program is to encourage people to report vulnerabilities to the developers, rather than selling them elsewhere.

If I have to pay money to submit a vulnerability to the developers with no guarantee that I'll even get refunded for a high quality and good faith report, let alone any actual payout, there's much less incentive for me to do so compared to selling them to someone else who won't charge me money for the privilege.

UncleMeat• 6 months ago

In a past life I was deeply involved in the operation of a bug bounty program. Discouraging people from selling on the black market was nowhere on the list of motivations.

We wanted to encourage white hat security researchers to look at our domain rather than other domains so we could collect more data on the kinds of vulns that appeared in our domain to help prioritize efforts that would fix the root causes of recurring bug patterns.

I've also submitted bug bounties and received rewards and I've worked with a bunch of other people who have done this. At no point did I even consider selling on the black market and I suspect that my friends from grad school were the same way.

Maybe the $1,000,000 bounties for zero click rce on iphones or whatever exist to discourage selling on the black market, but I'm not even sure that is true. "Well, I'll just find a way to sell this to the russian mob" is not exactly something that is on the radar of the vast majority of security researchers.

BrandoElFollito• 6 months ago

I found that banks are one of the worst organizations when it comes to authentication. They are regulated but the requirements are completely outdated and irrelevant in a risk context.

And then you have banks such as Boursobank (a French online bank) that has weak traditional authentication (and a faulty app, but they do not care) and out of the blue also provides passkeys. Making it at the same time horribly bad and wonderfully good.

The worst part is that they hide behind regulations when in fact there are only few of them.

Other instiytutions such as SWIFT are as bad and equally arrogant.

dspillett• 6 months ago

An entry fee that is reimbursed if the bug turns out to matter would stop this, real quick.

It would also stop a lot of genuine submissions unfortunately, as some literally can't pay not just won't pay (for both technical or financial reasons), and adds complexity¹. Each project working this way will need to process a bunch of payments and refunds on top of the actual bounty payments, which is not admin free nor potential financially cost free.

I can't think of an easy answer that would work for more than a very short amount of time. As soon as there is money involved and an easy way to use tooling rather than actual effort/understanding to be involved, many will try to game the system ruining it for those genuine participants. Heck, even if the reward is just credit² rather than money, that will happen. Many individual people are honest and useful, people as a whole are a bunch of untrustworthy arseholes who will innocence you and the rest of the world for a penny or just for shits & giggles.

Assuming the host of the bug bounty program is operating in good faith

This is a significant assumption. One that is it harder to not be paranoid about when you are putting money down.

they closed it as "works as intended", because they had decided that an optional password was more convenient than a required password

This does not surprise me. My primary bank (FirstDirect, UK) switched the way I authenticate from “between 5 and 9 alphanumeric characters”³ to a 5-digit pin, and all their messages about it assured me (like hell!) that this was “just as secure as before”…⁴

--------

[1] Needing a payment processing option that is compatible with both the reporter and reportee, at the point of submission. At the moment that can be arranged after the bounty is awarded rather than something a project like curl needs to have internationally setup and supported before accepting submissions.

[2] ref: people submitting several simple documentation fixes, one misplaced comma or 'postrophe per pull request, to game some “pull requests accepted” metric somewhere.

[3] which wasn't ideal to start with

[4] I would accept the description “no less secure than before” if they admitted that the previous auth requirements were also lax.

greggsy• 6 months ago

PIN only isn't too uncommon for online banking these days.

You still need to complete a SMS auth to do anything other than view records though, like transfer money.

shevy-java2• 6 months ago

It may stop it but it may also hinder real people contributing. How many people want to pay a free in order to "contribute"?

entuno4• 6 months ago

There's also the issue of what happens to my money as a researcher. Is it paid to the company, or is someone holding it in escrow? What if it takes the developer months to respond, or they never do? Do they just get to keep my money indefinitely? What if the vendor pulls out of the scheme? What if I do a chargeback on the payment I made? Etc, etc

I wonder if a better model would be to make the platform pay to entry, but not the specific bugs? So you have to pay a fee to gain access to a platform like HackerOne, and if your signal:noise ratio gets too bad then your account gets revoked? That would make it feel like less of a gamble than having to pay for every individual bug - but still has the same problem that it's putting a big barrier in front of legitimate good-faith researchers.

latexr• 6 months ago

An entry fee that is reimbursed if the bug turns out to matter would stop this, real quick.

That adds an extra layer of complexity to the cURL maintainers, handling other people’s money and whatnot. It was considered.

Daniel (cURL’s lead) has been discussing this for months. Whatever “quick and easy” solution you think of, it’s already been suggested and thought about and rejected for some reason.

billy99k• 6 months ago

I've been active in the bug bounty community for almost 7 years now. The problem is that the majority of companies don't act in good faith.

Even when you have something fully exploitable and valid, they will many times find some way to not pay you or lower the severity to pay you very little.

The catch-all excuse is something along the lines: "although this is vulnerable, it doesn't impact the business".

I've gotten this excuse, even when I could prove it was a production server with customer information that I could access.

Sites like Hackerone can help, but in the end, it comes down to the company running the bug bounty program.

smusamashah• 6 months ago

Github can use youtube strikes like system. PRs are tied to people. Someone reported for submitting slop should get a badge or something similar.

If a PR is submitted by someone who is then known to submit slops, they can be easily ignored by the maintainers.

EDIT: Or may be something like SponsorBlock for youtube. There could be a browser extension that will collectively tag sloppers the sameway and can help identify sloppers.

Hendrikto• 6 months ago

I've since learned that anything heavily regulated like hospitals and banks will have security procedures catering to compliance, not actual security.

This is the key insight. Nobody cares at all about actual security. It is all about checklists and compliance.

plastic0412• 6 months ago

related: cURL stopped HackerOne bug bounty program due to excessive slop reports https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46678710

novalis78• 6 months ago

Just use an LLM to weed them out. What’s so hard about that?

eqvinox• 6 months ago

At this point it's impossible to tell if this is sarcasm or not.

Brave new world we got there.

vee-kay• 6 months ago

Set a thief to catch a thief.

bootsmann• 6 months ago

If AI can't be trusted to write bug reports, why should it be trusted to review them?

GalaxyNova• 6 months ago

Because LLMs are bad at reviewing code for the same reasons they are bad at making it? They get tricked by fancy clean syntax and take long descriptions / comments for granted without considering the greater context.

colechristensen6• 6 months ago

I don't know, I prompted Opus 4.5 "Tell me the reasons why this report is stupid" on one of the example slop reports and it returned a list of pretty good answers.[1]

Give it a presumption of guilt and tell it to make a list, and an LLM can do a pretty good job of judging crap. You could very easily rig up a system to give this "why is it stupid" report and then grade the reports and only let humans see the ones that get better than a B+.

If you give them the right structure I've found LLMs to be much better at judging things than creating them.

Opus' judgement in the end:

"This is a textbook example of someone running a sanitizer, seeing output, and filing a report without understanding what they found."

1. https://claude.ai/share/8c96f19a-cf9b-4537-b663-b1cb771bfe3f

f311a• 6 months ago

How would it work if LLMs provide incorrect reports in the first place? Have a look at the actual HackerOne reports and their comments.

The problem is the complete stupidity of people. They use LLMs to convince the author of the curl that he is not correct about saying that the report is hallucinated. Instead of generating ten LLM comments and doubling down on their incorrect report, they could use a bit of brain power to actually validate the report. It does not even require a lot of skills, you have to manually tests it.

fc417fc8022• 6 months ago

Let the reporter duke it out with the project's gatekeeping LLM. If it keeps going on for long enough a human can quickly skim the exchange. It should be immediately obvious if the reporter is making sensible rebuttals or just throwing more slop at the wall.

I think fighting fire with fire is likely the correct answer here.

ChrisArchitect• 6 months ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46617410

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46678710

jameslk3• 6 months ago

It seems open source loses the most from AI. Open source code trained the models, the models are being used to spam open source projects anywhere there's incentive, they can be used to chip away at open source business models by implementing paid features and providing the support, and eventually perhaps AI simply replaces most open source code

giancarlostoro• 6 months ago

I wouldn't say open source code solely trained the models, surely there are CS courses and textbooks, official documentation as well as transcripts of talks and courses all factor in as well.

On another note, regarding AI replacing most open source code. I forget what tool it was, but I had a need for a very niche way of accessing an old Android device it was rooted, but if I used something like Disk Drill it would eventually crap out empty files. So I found a GUI someone made, and started asking Claude to add things I needed for it to a) let me preview directories it was seeing and b) let me sudo up, and let me download with a reasonable delay (1s I think) which basically worked, I never had issues again, it was a little slow to recover old photos, but oh well.

I debated pushing the code changes back into github, it works as expected, but it drifted from the maintainers own goals I'm sure.

ValveFan6969• 6 months ago

"open source" and "business model" in the same sentence... next you're gonna tell me to eat pudding with a fork.

jameslk3• 6 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc...

I think you should try eating pudding with a fork next

Aeglaecia• 6 months ago

i believe that the existence of not for profit organizations is a valid counterpoint to whatever your argument is

Grollicus• 6 months ago

Just leaving this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pudding_mit_Gabel

timeon3• 6 months ago

next you're gonna tell me to eat pudding with a fork

Depends if you are in UK or not.

bawolff11• 6 months ago

they can be used to chip away at open source business models by implementing paid features and providing the support

There are a lot of things to be sad about AI, but this is not it. Nobody has a right to a business model, especially one that assumes nobody will compete with you. If your business model relies on the rest of the world bring sucky so you can sell some value-added to open-core software, i'm happy when it fails.

sevenzero2• 6 months ago

Competition is extremely important yes. But not the kind of competition, backed by companies that have much bigger monetary assets, to overwhelm projects based on community effort just to trample it down. The FFMPEG Google stuff as an example.

anileated11• 6 months ago

When LLMs are based on stolen work and violate GPL terms, which should be already illegal, it's very much okay to be furious about the fact that they additionally ruin respective business models of open source, thanks to which they are possible in the guest place.

acdha• 6 months ago

I wouldn’t see it as having a “right” to a business model but more like an accelerated tragedy of the commons. LLMs can’t reason but they can chip away at the easiest parts of the job, which is great initially if you can take advantage of that but it means fewer people will put free things in the commons or develop the skills needed to do what LLMs fail at. This feels like the way bars changed their “free lunch” specials a century ago to prevent people from costing them money: nobody has a right to it, etc. but the free loader problem leads to something many people like going away.

shubhamjain• 6 months ago

I feel AI will have the same effect degrading Internet as social media did. This flood of dumb PRs, issues is one symptom of it. Other is AI accelerating the trend which TikTok started—short, shallow, low-effort content.

It's a shame since this technology is brilliant. But every tech company has drank the “AI is the future” Kool-aid, which means no one has incentive to seriously push back against the flood of low-effort, AI-generated slop. So, it's going to be race to the bottom for a while.

sevenzero2• 6 months ago

It'll stop soonish. The industry is now financed by debt rather than monetary assets that actually exist. Tons of companies see zero gain from AI as its reported repeatedly here on HN. So all the LLM vendors will eventually have to enshittify their products (most likely through ads, shorter token windows, higher pricing and whatnot). As of now, not a sustainable business model thankfully. The only sad part is that this debt will hit the poorest people most.

killerstorm• 6 months ago

I think "internet" needs a shared reputation & identity layer - i.e. if somebody offers a comment/review/contribution/etc, it should be easy to check - what else are their contributing, who can vouch for them, etc.

Most of innovation came from web startups who are just not interest in "shared" anything: they want to be a monopoly, "own" users, etc. So this area has been neglected, and then people got used to status quo.

PGP / GPG used to have web-of-trust but that sort of just died.

People either need to resurrect WoT updated for modern era, or just accept the fact that everything is spammed into smithereens. Blaming AI and social media does not help.

pravj• 6 months ago

Extending on the same line, we will see programs like Google Summer of Code (GSoC) getting a massive revamp, or they will stop operating.

From my failed attempt, I remember that

- Students had to find a project matching their interests/skills and start contributing early.

- We used to talk about staying away from some projects with a low supply of students applying (or lurking in the GitHub/BitBucket issues) because of the complexity required for the projects.

Both of these acted as a creative filter for projects and landed them good students/contributors, but it completely goes away with AI being able to do that at scale.

delfinom• 6 months ago

GSoC 4 years ago removed the need for their to be actual students to apply. We got flooded with middle aged men working 9-5s applying. It was dumb and we stopped participating. Their incentives were literally "extra income" instead of learning or participating beyond that.

GardenLetter27• 6 months ago

How so? I think the Bazaar model has the most to gain - contributors can use LLMs to create PRs, and you can choose from a vast array of projects depending on how much you trust vibe coding.

meibo• 6 months ago

Most of the drive-by LLM PRs we get are useless, waste our time and are super verbose on top of that. I don't review code like that anymore.

epolanski5• 6 months ago

AI is not submitting the slop, people are.

This is not a technology, but ethics and respect problem.

From the same article:

Not all AI-generated bug reports are nonsense. It’s not possible to determine the exact share, but Daniel Stenberg knows of more than a hundred good AI assisted reports that led to corrections.

Meaning: developers and researchers who use the tool as it's meant to work, as a tool, are leveraging it to improve curl. But they are not skipping the part of understanding the content of their reports, testing it, and only then submitting it.

account423• 6 months ago

Technically true but that argument also won't let you bring your gun on a plane.

dada78641• 6 months ago

It has also really accelerated the army of hustlers who can't actually code but want to get a contributor badge on major repos to put on their resume.

It's not like this sort of hustling didn't exist prior to LLMs but the volume has ballooned massively.

mrguyorama• 6 months ago

Any system of cheaply generating mediocre quality inherently benefits spammers and grifters more than anyone else.

Their biggest limiting factor is always the cost of generating mediocre content. Removing that barrier was the dumbest thing to do in the world.

TechSquidTV• 6 months ago

I couldn't possibly disagree more. AI has created an entirely new way to contribute to open source. You can not, in addition to donating to the maintainers, donate your _tokens_ to fix bugs.

blibble• 6 months ago

"AI" kills every part of open source

it kills the incentive to contribute, the incentive to maintain, the incentive to learn, the incentive to collaborate, and the ability to build a business based on your work

and it even kills the idea of traditional employment writing non-open source code

all so three USian companies can race to the bottom to sell your former employer a subscription based on your own previous work

ares6235• 6 months ago

Alternate headline: AI discovering so many exploits that cybersecurity can't keep up

Am I doing this right?

bawolff11• 6 months ago

There is a difference between AI discovering real vulnerabilities (e.g. the ffmpeg situation), and AI being used to spam fake vulnerabilities

groundzeros20155• 6 months ago

the ffmpeg situation

How do you know that?

potatoproduct2• 6 months ago

It's easy to discover an exploit when you're hallucinating:)

catlifeonmars5• 6 months ago

Is that the case?

happosai• 6 months ago

The LLM models give the most likely respond to a prompt. So if you prompt it with "find security bugs from this code" it will respond with "This may be a security bug" than you "you fucking donkey this curl code has already been eyeballed by hundreds of people, you think a statistic model will find something new?"

ryukoposting• 6 months ago

Heh.

Lots of folks not getting the joke in this thread.

ares6235• 6 months ago

Thank you

bawolff11• 6 months ago

Perhaps i'm dense, what is the joke here?

bilekas3• 6 months ago

I just read one of the slop submissions and it's baffling how anyone could submit these with a straight face.

https://hackerone.com/reports/3293884

Not even understanding the expected behaviour and then throwing as much slop as possible to see what sticks is the problem with generative AI.

nusl• 6 months ago

They don't care. They generate large amounts of these, spam them out, and hope for some small success. If they get banned or blocked, they make new accounts. Shame isn't even a factor; it's all about money. They don't even attempt to understand or care about a product.

This was partially the case before, where you'd still get weird spammy or extortive reports, but I guess LLMs enable random people to shoot their shot and gum up the works even more.

timeon3• 6 months ago

Shame isn't even a factor

That is general trend in society now.

epolanski5• 6 months ago

It's a human problem, not a tool one.

usrbinbash4• 6 months ago

It very much is also a tool problem.

LLMs have been marketed for years, with great meadia fanfare, as being almost magical, something that can do the job of software engineers. Every week, the hype is driven further.

This matters. When people get told everyday that XYZ is magic, some will believe so, and use it as if it is magic.

bilekas3• 6 months ago

I'm not sure I completely agree, I don't think it's that black and white, it's a similar analogy to Guns and gun violence.

Without the prevalence of guns there is simply less gun violence, but you could argue that it's also a human problem.

Giving people who have no business using an LLM to submit slop bug bounties is a problem of the tools accessibility. But also a human problem of course.

Edit: I should mention, I don't have a solution to the problem although I do like the other posters suggestion of a "deposit" scheme to submit a bug. I think that would incentives higher quality submissions.

Snakes3727• 6 months ago

The company I work for has a pretty bad bounty system (basically a security@corp email). We have a demo system and a public API with docs. We get around 100 or more emails a day now. Most of it is slop, scams, or my new favourite AI security companies sending us an AI generated pentest un prompted filled with false positives, untrue things, etc. It has become completely useless so no one looks at it.

I had a sales rep even call me up basically trying to book a 3 hour session to review the AI findings unprompted. When I looked at the nearly 250 page report, and saw a critical IIS bug for Windows server (doesn't exist) existing at a scanned IP address of 5xx.x.x.x (yes an impossible IP) publically available in AWS (we exclusively use gcp) I said some very choice words.

empath752• 6 months ago

I had a customer _turn off an entire kubernetes cluster in production_ because of a single hallucinated security finding.

nottorp2• 6 months ago

What I wonder is if this will actually reduce the amount of slop.

Bounties are a motivation, but there's also promotional purposes. Show that you submitted thousands of security reports to major open source software and you're suddenly a security expert.

Remember the little iot thing that got on here because of a security report complaining, among other things, that the linux on it did not use systemd?

bawolff11• 6 months ago

I dont think bounties make you an "expert". If you want to be deemed an expert, write blogs detailing how the exploit works. You can do that without a bounty.

In many ways one of the biggest benefits of bug bounties is having a dedicated place where you can submit reports and you know the person on the other end wants them and isn't going to threaten to sue you.

For the most part, the money in a bug bounty isn't work the effort needed to actually find stuff. The exception seens to be when you find some basic bug, that you can automate scan half the internet and submit to 100 different bug bounties.

nottorp2• 6 months ago

I dont think bounties make you an "expert".

It depends to who.

If you want to be deemed an expert, write blogs detailing how the exploit works.

That's necessary if you sell your services to people likely to enjoy HN.

Tade0• 6 months ago

I have a suspicion that most sloppers won't even get the memo about the discontinuation of the bounty program.

Springtime• 6 months ago

Outside of direct monetary gain like bounties are efforts to just stand out, in terms of being able to show contributions to a large project or getting say a CVE.

Stenberg has actually written about invalid/wildly overrated vulnerabilities that get assigned CVEs on their blog a few times and those were made by humans. I often get the sense some of these aren't just misguided reporters but deliberate attempts to make mountains out of molehills for reputation reasons. Things like this seem harder to account for as an incentive.

arjie2• 6 months ago

It makes sense. This process of searching for bugs was slow and time-consuming so it needed to be incentivized. This is no longer the case. Now the hard part is in identifying which ones are real.

To paraphrase a famous quote: AI-equipped bug hunters find 100 out of every 3 serious vulnerabilities.

wrxd• 6 months ago

Now the hard part is in identifying which ones are real.

So it’s still a slow and time consuming process.

arjie2• 6 months ago

Tragically expository, wrxd. My facetiousness condemned through explanation.

StrauXX3• 6 months ago

The process of finding bugs is still slow and time consuming. The kinds of vulnerabilities you find in codebases like cURL are still beyond AI. Binary exploitation is still a human only field.

doe88• 6 months ago

Funny how we are now sensitivized to these AI slops, at first I fixated on the En dashes in the lead of the article, made me doubt of the article's author for a few seconds.

StrauXX3• 6 months ago

The solution for this, IMO, is flags. Just like with CTFs, host an instance of your software with a flag that can only be retrieved after a successful exploit. If someone submits the flag to you, there is no argueing about wether or not they found a valid vulnerability.

Yes, this does not work for all vulnerability classes, but it is the best compromise in my mind.

snowmobile4• 6 months ago

How exactly would that work? Curl isn't exactly software that can be "hosted" somewhere, and I'm not sure where you'd hide the flag in the software? Either very few actual vulns would end up being able to retrieve the flag, or it would be trivial to retrieve the flag without an exploit.

zvqcMMV6Zcr2• 6 months ago

In most basic form it would just be form with URL that (lib)curl is later supposed to fetch. And target server (controlled by researcher) is supposed to send payload that triggers RCE in client.

Sure, it covers a very narrow scope but I am afraid the bigger issue would be that it is going to get spammed with submitted links. And those links will often be to strait up illegal content, it might not matter that such server instantly deletes all downloaded files.

StrauXX3• 6 months ago

Simple. You multiple instances with different flags covering different threat models. RCE, file read, etc. You then expose a webapplication for every instance that lets users control only those curl flags, that must be safe to be user controlled in the reapective threat model.

ILoveHorses2• 6 months ago

A video showing some of the gems which most likely led to this frustration: https://youtu.be/8w6r4MKSe4I?si=7nfRd0VmX8tvXAnY

72deluxe3• 6 months ago

I started watching it but the modern presentation style of shouting everything instead of speaking at a normal volume, and using many many gestures and facial expressions to state a simple sentence made me switch it off rapidly.

It seems to be a presentation style afflicting the YouTube generation, where they think you want to see a colossal microphone in someone's face (directional microphones work very well, and is a reason you can hear dialogue in a film without a mic in front of everyone) whilst they gesticulate wildly and over-emphasise words in a sentence. It is quite wearying; perhaps it's because I am British, but it is afflicting general conversation where only superlatives can be used ("awesome" "amazing" "insane" "mind-blowing") instead of "good"/"enjoyable".

ILoveHorses2• 6 months ago

I guess that's modern yt. At least it's not an AI slop channel.

sockmeistr• 6 months ago

Archive mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20260121081507/https://etn.se/in...

skirge2• 6 months ago

Free work eventually turns out not to be free at all.

MrJobbo• 6 months ago

Smart, bug bounties are a huge PITA.

shevy-java2• 6 months ago

So AI slop is used to attempt to degrade the quality of cURL.

rob74• 6 months ago

“Not much. The real incentive for finding a vulnerability in cURL is the fame ('brand is priceless'), not the hundred or few thousand dollars. $10,000 (maximum cURL bounty) is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, for somebody capable of finding a critical vulnerability in curl.”

That's the choice as seen from the perspective of a white-hat hacker. But for an exploitable vulnerability, the real choice is to sell it to malware producers (I'm including state-sponsored spyware companies like the makers of Pegasus in this category) for a lot of money, or do the more moral thing and earn at least a little bit of money via a bug bounty program.

smallpipe• 6 months ago

Hopefully the malware authors have the same issue of filtering through garbage AI submission

snowmobile4• 6 months ago

That's a story that people like to tell to justify bug bounty programs, but it strikes me as very unlikely that some random pentester / white-hat hacker would have access to communication with malware producers.

Black-hat hackers seem entirely unreasonable to deal with, you'd have to manage some sort of escrow payment (because neither party trusts the other) probably through cryptocurrency, and then deal with laundering the money, et cetera.

Perhaps one could as you theorize, go to some private company, but it'd have to be at least somewhat approved by the white-hat hacker's own government lest they risk legal trouble, and I'm still dubious that the company would be all that willing to pay for some "freelance hacker's" supposed vuln.

The logistics just don't make sense.

notepad0x906• 6 months ago

This is silly, people don't need AI to send you garbage. If your project is getting lots of junk reports, you should take it as a good sign, that people are looking at it a lot now. You don't remove the incentive, you ask for help to triage the junk.

Curl is a popular and well supported tool, if it needs help in this area, there will be a long line of competent people not volunteering their time and/or money. If you need help, get more help. don't use "AI slop" as an excuse to remove the one incentive people have to not sell exploits or just hoard them.

usrbinbash4• 6 months ago

This is silly, people don't need AI to send you garbage

People also don't need cigarettes to fall ill. But smoking still causes health problems.

notepad0x906• 6 months ago

What's your point? Because people smoke cigarettes, people who buy unrelated things should be punished? Or because a store sells cigarettes, stores in general shouldn't be paid for what they sell? Or is the time and effort to find vulns valueless?

Sharlin• 6 months ago

You don't need a car to kill someone in traffic, but it's certainly much easier with one.

snowmobile4• 6 months ago

There are many incentives not to sell exploits, the major one being that it's not logistically feasible. First of all the people submitting these false reports don't have any real exploits.

But imagine you were sitting on an actual RCE exploit in curl, who would you sell it to? How would you convince them it's working without disclosing the details for free? How would you get paid?

Curl is a popular and well supported tool, if it needs help in this area, there will be a long line of competent people not volunteering their time and/or money

I'm not sure if that not is a typo, but yes, even though a tool is very popular, there's almost nobody competent and willing to work on it for free. This has been a well-known problem in open source for decades now.

notepad0x906• 6 months ago

It's a typo, even if they don't sell it why report it to curl? for clout? You can still exploit it against real world apps. Who would they sell it to? I would sell it to zerodium instead of report to curl personally.

How much time do people spend finding bugs, is their time not worth anything because some other random people decide to use AI?

Curl is high-visibility, there are people. and it doesn't take a lot of competency to triage. Heck, I like to think I have a good handle at C and memory exploitation, I will volunteer my time for free if they need help.

rcxdude• 6 months ago

Curl did already tend to get a decent number of junk reports from people who just didn't know what they were doing, but this was limited to the number of productive idiots who focused their productivity on curl specifically. AI allows significantly less motivated idiots to create substantially more workload, and therefore upgrades this phenomenon from a minor annoyance to a big problem, one that may just render publicly submitted bug reports not worth the project's time.

(And no, curl does not have a huge pool of potential maintainers to pull from on this. Open-source software in general suffers from a big lack of manpower, especially relative to the popularity of the tool)

notepad0x906• 6 months ago

My point was #1 that it is a volume problem, and #2, you don't need maintainers to triage bugs and prs, even bots can do that for simpler things. They can have a pool of project members to upvote a bug report before maintainers look at it.

memesarecool• 6 months ago

Hackerone (where cURL hosted their bounty program) tracks the reputation of bounty hunters. I don't understand why they are not taking advantage of this. Make a private program, invite only hackers who have proved themselves by submitting relevant reports.

spiffyk• 6 months ago

Say all projects did just that, only allowing reports from proven hackers. How does a new hacker then prove themselves?

sillywabbit• 6 months ago

Start a lemonade stand?

GuinansEyebrows• 6 months ago

i think that hypothetical is too simplistic to accurately frame the situation. we're talking about one of the largest, most widely used libraries in the open source world. at that level, they don't really need unknowns to use their project to "prove themselves" - they can contribute to smaller projects or put their own work out into the world.

GeorgeOldfield• 6 months ago

find bugs for free at first. implement negative reputation for BS bugs

empath752• 6 months ago

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s...

most of them are new users or will just create a new account if their reputation gets hit.

Retr0id• 6 months ago

I'm not sure how effective this will be. A lot of AI-generated bug bounty reports are pure spam, but a significant fraction are well-meaning humans who genuinely believe the nonsense an LLM has given them. The former category do not read the rules in the first place and will not be deterred - spray and pray is their MO. The second category will not believe that any "no slop" rules apply to them, because they genuinely think their bug is real.

druvisc• 6 months ago

Why did “AI slop” disappear from the title?

pavel_lishin• 6 months ago

Probably because it wasn't in the actual submission title.

ykurtov• 6 months ago

It's really hard to comprehend how entitled "reward which would be the cost of lunch in Sweden can be massive for those low socio-economic-located people" is.

A lunch in central Stockholm is well within 200 kronor. I can't imagine a country where an person with a computer and skills necessary to claim a bounty in cURL would consider that amount massive.

Get real.

pnt12• 6 months ago

Is he entitled for considering the difficultied from developing countries?

Maybe he's exaggerating a bit with the comparison, but if we consider the ceiling of 10k, that's more than a year of minimum wage in Portugal, or a handful of years in certain developing counties. Certainly significant!

cURL removes bug bounties

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