Trusted access for the next era of cyber defense

https://openai.com/index/scaling-trusted-access-for-cyber-defense/

by surprisetalk • 3 months ago

94 64 3 months ago

ofjcihen3• 3 months ago

I love that in the era of having LLMs summarize everything all of these companies have opted for what I call the “YouTube streamer apology video” tone and length for these announcements.

These feels more or less like a way to get in the news after Anthropic's Mythos announcement by removing some guardrails. I’m still signing up though.

alopha• 3 months ago

That's a lot of waffle to try and say 'we've got a really scary next model coming too real soon, promise!'

guzfip• 3 months ago

More like they realized how much money they were wasting letting the proles generate slop and vibe code the same CRUD app they rewrote in 5 different JavaScript frameworks a few years back.

The money is in enterprise and government. The consumer market doesn’t remotely pay enough. It’s just the same story with Microsoft purposely making Windows an unusable mess because that’s not where they make their money. It was good to establish themselves, but that market is getting dumped.

flyinglizard• 3 months ago

Wait six months, get the Chinese version.

Phelinofist• 3 months ago

Sounds totally reasonable to trust OpenAI and the sociopath sama.

iammjm• 3 months ago

"trusted" + openai just simply doesn't compute for me any more

mmooss• 3 months ago

This approach means only a tiny portion of the population will every qualify. Doesn't that make everyone else beholden to those few, who are beholden to OpenAI?

Another solution is to make software makers responsible and liable for the output of their products. It's long been a problem that there is little legal responsibility, but we shouldn't just accept it. If Ford makes exploding cars, they are liable. If OpenAI makes software that endangers people, it should be the same.

Democratized access: Our goal is to make these tools as widely available as possible while preventing misuse. We design mechanisms which avoid arbitrarily deciding who gets access for legitimate use and who doesn’t. That means using clear, objective criteria and methods – such as strong KYC and identity verification – to guide who can access more advanced capabilities and automating these processes over time.

KYC isn't democratic and doesn't prevent arbitrary favoritism, it's the opposite: It's used to control people and to favor friends and exclude enemies.

luma• 3 months ago

So who is at fault in your solution, the org who created and shipped the software bug, or the company that discovered it?

I don't see how OpenAI is Ford in your analogy as OpenAI didn't make the software that blew up.

sureMan6• 3 months ago

Another solution is to make software makers responsible and liable for the output of their products. It's long been a problem that there is little legal responsibility, but we shouldn't just accept it. If Ford makes exploding cars, they are liable. If OpenAI makes software that endangers people, it should be the same.

That kind of thinking is exactly why LLMs are so censored, because people think OAI should be liable if someone uses chatgpt to commit cyber crimes

How about cyber crimes are already illegal and we just punish whoever uses the new tools to commit crimes instead of holding the tool maker liable

This gets complex if LLMs enable children to commit complex crimes but that's different from just outright restricting the tool for everyone because someone might misuse it

0x3f2• 3 months ago

There's always some wedge issue that means "don't punish the toolkmaker" is not politically viable. You can pick from guns to legal drugs to illegal drugs to all kinds of emotive things.

And once the wedge is in and the concept of maker responsibility is planted, it expands to people's pet issues, obviously.

The actual line of who gets punished just ends up at some equilibrium in the middle. Largely arbitrarily.

marshray• 3 months ago

"It's just a neutral tool" gets a lot harder to claim once a vendor starts specifically training and marketing the model for its ability to bypass security controls.

Yes, pentesting tools, even automated ones, are often legal. But they commonly do run up against legal restrictions and risks. They're marketed very differently from ChatGPT.

Havoc• 3 months ago

democratized access
partner with a limited set of organizations for more cyber-permissive models.

I get where they're going with this, but still rather hilarious how they had to get a corporate speak expert pull of the mental gymnastics needed for the announcement

0x3f2• 3 months ago

It must be representative democracy! And our representative is... Larry Ellison. Oh no.

TeMPOraL6• 3 months ago

No need for corporate speak experts anymore, SOTA LLMs are more than capable of doing that job now.

bunnywantspluto• 3 months ago

It seems like local LLMs will get popular for cybersecurity if this trend of locking access to models continues.

alephnerd2• 3 months ago

Not really. Not performant enough. Most organizations who would be interested in using a foundation model for security would either purchase the model directly or purchase a vendor who adds their special sauce or context to the model

ACCount372• 3 months ago

Too little too late. OpenAI's shit was nearly worthless for cybersec for what, a year already?

ChatGPT 5.x just tries to deny everything remotely cybersecurity-related - to the point that it would at times rather deny vulnerabilities exist than go poke at them. Unless you get real creative with prompting and basically jailbreak it. And it was this bad BEFORE they started messing around with 5.4 access specifically.

And that was ChatGPT 5.4. A model that, by all metrics and all vibes, doesn't even have a decisive advantage over Opus 4.6 - which just does whatever the fuck you want out of the box.

What's I'm afraid the most of is that Anthropic is going to snort whatever it is that OpenAI is high on, and lock down Mythos the way OpenAI is locking down everything.

jruz• 3 months ago

That’s the whole point of this variant of the model, it won’t have those guardrails.

ACCount372• 3 months ago

Yes. But "perform a humiliation ritual of KYC to access the actual model instead of the nerfed version of it that's so neurotic about cybersec you have to sink 400 tokens into getting it to a usable baseline" does not inspire any confidence at all.

alephnerd2• 3 months ago

OpenAI's shit was nearly worthless for cybersec for what, a year already

Plenty of AI for Cybersecurity companies use a mixture of models depending on iteration and testing, including OpenAI's.

zb3• 3 months ago

Ultimately, we aim to make advanced defensive capabilities available to legitimate actors large and small, including those responsible for protecting critical infrastructure, public services, and the digital systems people depend on every day.

Translation: we aim to make defensive capabilities available to US and their vassals so they can protect critical infrastructure, while ensuring countries that are independent can't protect against US attacking their critical infrastructure.

Fortunately, this plan will backfire - the model capability is exaggerated and these "safeguards" don't reliably work.

gavinray2• 3 months ago

I completed the "Trusted Access" verification, but it seems to have unlocked nothing in the OpenAI API or Codex models.

Just FYI for others.

hoss1474489• 3 months ago

I see a Security button in the what’s new box in the Codex section of the ChatGPT website. It appears to allow me to run vulnerability scans against my connected GitHub repositories.

Direct link: https://chatgpt.com/codex/cloud/security

gavinray2• 3 months ago

I also have access to this but can't be certain if it was there before or not.

Anyone else who hasn't verified able to access?

alphabettsy• 3 months ago

That’s been there for awhile.

ofjcihen3• 3 months ago

So it seems like you just…have it once you get approved. I’m testing it now and nothing indicates I’m running a different model but it just doesn’t fight me on cybersecurity stuff

2001zhaozhao• 3 months ago

Requiring verified access is a good idea to mitigate risks from hacking while still giving people access to the latest models. Take notes, Anthropic.

striking• 3 months ago

A 5.4 spin with slightly different guardrails is not "access to the latest models". We know this to be true from the article because they have a section entitled "Looking ahead to our upcoming model release and beyond". I wonder if they didn't just feel like they were caught out by Mythos.

Avicebron• 3 months ago

I don't think they've added enough cyber. My cyber workflow demands more trusted access for cyber so that I can use these cyber-permissive models for my cybersecurity.

ofjcihen3• 3 months ago

Whoa hey now, if they just give out all the cyber all at once they might run out or worse, the bad guys will horde all the cyber for themselves!

No no, best to have them distribute the cyber to us responsibly.

SoftTalker• 3 months ago

Just wait until you meet the Cybermen.

swyx• 3 months ago

you make fun of it but i kind of like that the security community has just embraced this kinda old school hokey term. its a short hand. leave them be.

cshimmin• 3 months ago

Incidentally, I recently learned the origin of the term. Cyber - short for cybernetic - is from the greek κυβερνήτης (kybernetes), meaning helmsman. The original use of cybernetics is in the context of automated control systems, so steering a rudder was a good analogy. It is also the origin for the name k8s.

Jedd• 3 months ago

It's a source of minor, but persistent, annoyance that security people have tried to abscond with the prefix cyber, morphing it into a synonym for security.

Having grown up reading cyberpunk novels about life in cyberspace, a passing interest in cybernetics (though not of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation variety), it's frustrating to lose a 'this means computer or internet related' prefix.

bee_rider• 3 months ago

Hmm, I guess this puts the unregulated banking enthusiasts’ stealing of the crypto prefix in a new light.

SturgeonsLaw• 3 months ago

As far as I can tell, using the word cyber to specifically and only talk about security has come from the kind of suits who take Gartner seriously.

I don't know any techies who use the term like that, unless they're in a role that interfaces with the suits.

zarzavat• 3 months ago

I'm ready with my robe and wizard hat, Sam.

FacelessJim• 3 months ago

I would definitely love a glass of smoked cyber

atoav• 3 months ago

Just make sure you use cyber periphery (e.g. a cyber keyboard) to type out your cyber prompts and you will be cyb.. ahh.. fine.

greatgib• 3 months ago

All of that reminds me about how gpt2 was almost too dangerous to be released to the world...

onoesworkacct• 3 months ago

It was. The internet really has been filled with abject shit and social media is bots talking to bots.

keyle• 3 months ago

It's not like the world is a better place since...

nullc• 3 months ago

Make cyber not cyber.

CompoundEyes• 3 months ago

Wonder if Cyber would’ve caught the Claude Code source map leak?

rishabhaiover• 3 months ago

I mean Anthropic clearly wins with the name (Mythos vs 'GPT-5.4-Cyber')

mikewarot3• 3 months ago

It's important to keep perspective, the holes that everyone (including LLMs now) keep finding in pretty much everything are mostly the fault of running things with ambient authority, instead of using systems based on default deny, and capabilities.

I used to think we were 20 years away from a shift to Capabilities based Operating Systems, which were ----> this <---- close to being adopted widely when the PC revolution swiped them aside.

Unfortunately, I think we're about to repeat history, and we're now 20+ years out from actually solving things, AGAIN. 8(

TeMPOraL6• 3 months ago

"Solve things" or actually do something useful, pick one.

If anything, maybe the security community can finally be arsed to consider ad-hoc delegation of authority as a core concept and a basic use case, because that's arguably the primary source of persistent user-level security issues in computing.

In real life, it's absolutely normal to ask random people on the fly to do something in your name, with your credentials - whether that's sending your kid with your credit card for a grocery run, asking spouse to do some bank transfers for you or set up a new computer for you, or asking a co-worker to operate some system. It's the other reason people write passwords on post-its: even without bullshit password strength rules (see xkcd://936), there's still a frequent need to share passwords with people.

Meanwhile, for the past decades, security community has been insisting on tying authority to individuals, and doing everything possible both technologically and socially to prevent authority delegation (except in top tier corporate systems, where this is technically supported, but in such convoluted, complex and broken ways that it may as well not exist - people will still resort to post-its in drawers).

Until this basic concept is recognized, I fear more broad security improvements will only result in more useful work being prevented from happening, and more people-years wasted as users figure out ways to defeat security measures so they can do their actual jobs.

Melatonic2• 3 months ago

Are those really things people do all the time ? Not sure I would trust any kid with my credit card

mikewarot3• 3 months ago

In the 1970s my Mom would give me a $20 capability token to exchange in a store for cigarettes, in her name, while she waited withy sisters in the car. I was about 15 at the time, and it was a normal part of life. She never gave me a signed blank check.

Giving $20 to an AI is far safer than giving it your credit card. The effects are limited to $20 of loss.

NoahZuniga• 3 months ago

Many (maybe even most bugs) the ais are finding are memory safety errors, which is pretty clearly not "the fault of running things with ambient authority". The data is treated as untrusted, but due to a mistake can still do something it shouldn't.

mikewarot3• 3 months ago

The thing is, if you're only allowed to access the actual files the user selected (at runtime) those are the only things that could possibly be corrupted. A memory error in any given app doesn't set up for a system compromise in a capabilities based system.

Trusted access for the next era of cyber defense

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