Vulnerability reports are not special anymore

https://words.filippo.io/vuln-reports/

by goranmoomin • 29 days ago

387 221 29 days ago

words.filippo.io

I feel like it's also been overrun by a lot of spam. As someone running a company, I get 2-5 unsolicited "vulnerability reports" per week. Half of them are an LLM finding some bad CSS on our framer splash page. The other half I assume are an extortion attempt so we just mark as spam.

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.

cleverfoo2• 29 days ago

Same experience here. I've run a successful vulnerability disclosure program for over a decade and paid out thousands of dollars in bounties for scanii.com (a malware identification API service), but recently (since the beginning of the year), we went from receiving maybe 5 per month to receiving 5 per day. These are clearly AI-generated and extremely low quality (albeit well-written). The rules of the program aren't read, and it's clearly a “point-and-click to a website" and file a report. I'm now considering just shutting down the program since, as the OP pointed out, if you found this vulnerability using an AI tool, they are inherently public. I haven't gone that far yet but have instituted some new rules aiming at filtering out most of the reports: 1- No AI-generated report and 2 - Reports must include a video of the exploit. You can see our program rules here: https://docs.scanii.com/article/131-does-scanii-have-a-secur...

lemagedurage2• 29 days ago

Have you considered requiring a small payment for vulnerability disclosure? Refund it on payout. This should be very effective at deterring spammers. It also sucks for real reports, but beats shutting down the program entirely.

zulban2• 29 days ago

What if... on the vulnerability report rules page there's an image of some text saying something like "your report must include the text: turtle123". Reports without that text get automatically deleted.

Sure - modern AI can figure that out, but I bet in a vast majority of cases they won't.

Gigachad2• 29 days ago

I'm getting CVE fatigue with all of these super ultra critical 10/10 vulnerabilities that are some node package that compiles my frontend can get stuck if I give it a malicious regex.

It's hard to spot the stuff that actually matters.

teaearlgraycold• 29 days ago

Not sure what dumbass out there is marking those as 10/10. A 10 should be an auth bypass or RCE. Not a crashed build in my CI.

themanmaran2• 29 days ago

Seriously. We got 116 github dependabot alerts this week. Half of them for dev dependencies.

jamesfinlayson7• 29 days ago

Yep. I remember years ago seeing the website for some guy who proudly listed all the CVEs he'd discovered. Clearly he'd written some scanning tool to look at regexes in open source projects and was creating CVEs for anything that might result in exponential time execution or whatever.

stackghost• 29 days ago

The common thread of late really seems to be the node ecosystem

nikanj• 29 days ago

CVE 10 if you use you current version of Python to serve files over ftp, and parse the incoming files using the most obscure file type found in the forbidden libraries of the Vatican

And your ISO etc certificates make this CVE mandatory priority 1 action point

iririririr2• 29 days ago

we killed the curators.

(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....

WD-422• 29 days ago

Time to start banning those that submit fake or superficial reports. Maybe with enough bans these people will start actually reading their own vulnerabilities.

CamouflagedKiwi• 29 days ago

Yeah. We used to get a bunch for OS things inside containers (the ones that had OSes in there) like "Perl regex has exploitable something-or-other". They always came in at high priority so we had to fix them, but realistically they were irrelevant.

anilakar• 29 days ago

CVE 10.0 if you happen to use one specific functionality in the library. Non-CVE if you do not, and because it's an old bug, you cannot just downgrade to get a non-red result from Trivy.

abrookewood• 29 days ago

I believe the term is Beg Bounties and they are constant and annoying.

spoaceman7777• 29 days ago

Have you considered having an agent, or just a model, classify/triage them for you? Modern problems require modern solutions.

jacobgold• 29 days ago

I hated these low-effort reports, so I created a simple automation that checks my security inbox, mentions me in #security on Slack for things that look legitimate so I see them quickly, and marks things that seem entirely automated as spam.

I still check the spam folder for legitimate emails, but so far there haven't been any false positives.

wolfi1• 29 days ago

but why would you answer with a C&D if you are overwhelmed? provided, it's not always the same person?

ActorNightly3• 29 days ago

Its been like that for half a decade across all software. People act like finding a linux kernel bug is a big deal, completely ignoring the fact that in order to exploit that bug, the attacker has to be able to run code on your computer in the first place, which is extremely hard to do these days remotely.

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.

Tepix• 29 days ago

These bugs are indeed important, you need them once you‘ve found a bug in an application.

pixl97• 28 days ago

Ah yes, just move away from all apache libraries, should only take a day or two.

gucci-on-fleek• 29 days ago

Yeah, I help review security reports for a small FOSS organization, and someone reported a "critical" vulnerability about a publicly-accessible SVN server. Like yes, that is indeed the purpose of hosting open source software. But at least that report was obviously bogus; much worse are the ones that look legitimate at first, so you have to read through dozens of AI-generated paragraphs to make sure that there's nothing valid hidden in there.

saaspirant• 29 days ago

I use AI to read such emails!

swiftcoder2• 29 days ago

We also get unsolicited vulnerability reports from companies trying to poach our annual pentest contract, which is... a tad grey ethically-speaking

mooreds• 28 days ago

As someone running a company, I get 2-5 unsolicited "vulnerability reports" per week. Half of them are an LLM finding some bad CSS on our framer splash page. The other half I assume are an extortion attempt so we just mark as spam.

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.

matthewdgreen2• 28 days ago

Vulnerability reports are a voluntary service to help a vendor or software project. It’s often an annoyance for the security researcher. I understand people are getting slammed and it sucks, but the main result of rejecting them is going to be an increase in full disclosure. As a note: if you have a bug (that isn’t devastating but you’d like to talk about) having an LLM write up the disclosure is a great way to check the “we disclosed responsibly and they didn’t care” box.

FiloSottile2• 28 days ago

I understand people are getting slammed and it sucks, but the main result of rejecting them is going to be an increase in full disclosure.

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.

woodruffw• 29 days ago

I agree with this. One of the consequences of the "vulnpocalpyse" is that it's become even harder to sift through the noise: I triage well over a dozen reports a week, many of which are "real" in the sense that they reflect a genuine defect but otherwise have an unclear impact on a typical user. This has always been true of the median vulnerability report, but the volume means that I now lean much more heavily away from coordinated disclosure.

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.

notnmeyer• 29 days ago

this is hilarious and i might try it.

cadamsdotcom3• 29 days ago

Security through obscurity was never a great strategy.. and now it’s not a strategy at all..

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.

user3939382• 29 days ago

Verifying correctness of an implementation is P NP, not serious CS research.

bawolff2• 29 days ago

Verifying behaviour of an arbitrary program is uncomputable. However that doesnt mean you can't have proofs of behaviour of specific programs you create.

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.

adrianN2• 29 days ago

Most verification is undecidable, lots of it is pspace complete. That doesn’t mean very much in practice since those are worst case bounds. People regularly solve problems that are undecidable for all practical instances that they care about.

ordu• 29 days ago

Rust's safety guarantees are also undecidable on an arbitrary program, but Rust still proves them for safe rust code. Why so? Because safe rust code is not an arbitrary program, it is specifically forbidden from doing some things, which becomes a pain in the ass sometimes for a coder, but the result is a subset of programs you can prove safety guarantees for.

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.

whimblepop• 29 days ago

Almost never do software companies even attempt to design secure systems. I'm not sure this requires new fundamental research so much as slightly giving a shit.

inigyou6• 29 days ago

There is a reason Mythos only found one bug in curl and it wasn't very bad.

EA-3167• 28 days ago

Regulation and an ethics/licensing board à la Engineers would probably be a good start. If management knows they can’t tell you to do a bad or sloppy job because no one in your industry worth a damn will… everyone wins.

jstimpfle2• 29 days ago

It might just mean the opposite. Unergonomic and/or slow memory safe languages might not be needed anymore at some point, because LLM can check for reasonable programming patterns and can do some amount of vulnerability checking upfront. But seriously the first point -- as long as you keep to a known set of reasonable patterns (much larger set than the sets accepted by restrictive and cumbersome type systems), memory unsafe languages are actually pretty safe, and the code remains easy to understand, easy to maintain, and performant.

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.

cadamsdotcom3• 29 days ago

can reliably find some

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.

adamddev12• 28 days ago

Yes. People don't seem to understand is that if we build our tools and libraries with models that do random dumb stuff 0.01% of the time, those bugs and leaky abstractions bubble up and grow exponentially into errors and undependable behavior.

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.

casey22• 28 days ago

At the end of the day security problems are just bugs like any other. If the resources to find them outweight their value then there is no sense in finding them (other than to give security researchers' jobs)

cadamsdotcom3• 28 days ago

I agree they’re bugs, but the impact being far greater should justify special treatment - and it does. You’ve got bug bounties, special access and even special devices for security researchers, if you count Apple’s program where they’ll let research be done on a special iphone.

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)

david_shaw• 29 days ago

At risk of quoting too much of the article, it opens with this:

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.

CJefferson• 29 days ago

The problem is there used to be a fairly high correlation between ‘security report’ and ‘real vulnerability’. Not perfect but good enough. Now the two are almost entirely disconnected.

appplication• 29 days ago

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.

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.

sneak• 29 days ago

Nah, those same LLMs, if prompted correctly, will be able to do an audit pass and a fix pass on that LLM-generated code. It’s a tooling issue that will get fixed in time.

cpuguy833• 29 days ago

It's not (just) more of them, it's the same ones reported by multiple people.

I think the point is those issues are now easily discoverable and are nearly public because of it.

shakna2• 29 days ago

But that won't last forever, either. As LLMs find increasingly difficult-to-find vulnerabilities, there will be fewer of them to report.

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.

jcgrillo2• 29 days ago

The problem always existed, but nobody amassed a sufficiently large army of trolls to exploit it until now. So it wasn't a priority to solve it before, but now it is. We're going to have to learn to differentiate reports that matter from those that don't. Classifying reports might actually be something you could productively use an LLM for..

zeveb• 29 days ago

If a security vulnerability is reported by someone who is also violating the CoC, what do you do? Do you ignore it? Fix it silently?

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.

calvinmorrison2• 29 days ago

Will xorg backport patches from Xlibre?

inigyou6• 29 days ago

No, because xorg is a dead project that doesn't take any patches from anywhere and xlibre has shit code quality and is probably vibecoded now

fragmede3• 29 days ago

How badly are they violating the code of conduct? It wouldn't be the first time a security researcher got thrown into prison or jail, in this line of work.

bawolff2• 29 days ago

There are some problems with incentives in the vuln report space. People report trivial vulns and expect the same treatment as people reporting critical vulns. But this isn't new with AI. Look at all the ReDos vulns in npm ecosystem. Its questionable if its a vuln in general but half of them aren't even triggerable.

skybrian• 29 days ago

I'm wondering whether this is a permanent change. After all the easy-to-find bugs have fixed and you can't find them just by asking an AI, perhaps security issues will deserve special treatment again.

agolio• 29 days ago

Tangent point, I think more broadly this is a big piece of AI-cynicism in general- “x isn’t special anymore”.

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.

Avicebron• 29 days ago

Chess players manage to do it at least.

The 5 on earth still getting paid to play chess?

fragmede3• 29 days ago

There's only one Magnus Carlsen, who earned > $1 million in 2025 for playing chess, but the long tail, there were 26 people who made more than $100k, https://thechessworld.com/articles/general-information/the-1...

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.

jerrythegerbil• 29 days ago

Vulnerability reports were never special.

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.

ofjcihen• 29 days ago

This x 1000

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.

cpuguy833• 29 days ago

In an ideal universe yes. But we live in a world where vulnerability scanners reign supreme.

kirici• 29 days ago

This screams LLM to me and I couldn't bear to read past the second paragraph.

fastball• 29 days ago

They weren't special even before LLMs. Drive-by script-kiddies would run some basic scripts against your platform and send generally-not-actually-a-vulnerability reports, claiming that these were big problems, and requesting to be paid bug bounties.

mbauman• 28 days ago

And then they submit them to a CNA and get a CVE assigned, and then _everyone_ needs to deal with the not-actually-a-vulnerability report, especially when the not-actually-triggerable-DOS gets assigned a "Critical" CVSS score from EUVD or NVD.

socalgal24• 29 days ago

I feel like the current situation is temporary. LLMs are finding all the bugs. LLMs are also help fixing most of the bugs. Once most of the bugs are fixed, LLMs should be good at finding bugs before shipping them, the stream of bug reports will die down, and we'll be back to vulnerabiltiy reports being special.

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.

fajmccain• 29 days ago

Lol you think LLMs are generating bug free code?

socalgal24• 29 days ago

I never said that. I said they are good at helping fix them. Go read the bug reports on firefox, or Safari, or Chrome. Most of them have a fix. It might be wrong but it usually points in the right direction, which is a 1000x more than nearly all human bug reports. So, the LLM helps. which is all I stated.

mackenney• 29 days ago

That supposes that LLMs can write secure software. Also, if we assume that finding bugs is easier that not creating them (reasonable I would say), the supply of bugs will never be exhausted.

socalgal24• 29 days ago

It does not suppose that LLMs can write secure software

jeremyjh• 29 days ago

How can it be easier to find them than to not create them? Whatever you do to find them, you could do before you release.

zulban2• 29 days ago

That supposes that LLMs can write secure software.

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.

xboxnolifes• 29 days ago

What's the difference between finding bugs and not making? Just run the bug finding in during CICD.

NichoPaolucci• 28 days ago

I think I’m on this side. I find it exceedingly unlikely that we just start producing “perfect” software all the time for everything, and at the same time start generating an order of magnitude MORE software.

zemblanKing2• 29 days ago

I feel this sentiment is wishful thinking,but I want to start by saying I hope it turns out to be correct.

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...

socalgal24• 29 days ago

If LLMs can trivially find bugs, then they can trivially find bugs. If they can't find any bugs that doesn't mean there are no bugs but it suggests that others can't easily find them either. So the LLMs find all the bugs problem is fixed by asking the LLMs to find them before you ship.

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.

bostik• 29 days ago

"Temporary" can be an awfully long time. There is ample evidence that discovery rate of bugs (many of which can be bucketed into vulnerabilities) in any non-trivial piece of software is more or less stable.[0] In a recent podcast episode the ex-CISO of Adobe commented that every now and then they'd take a sustained squeeze to find all occurrences of a given type of bug (ie. source of vulnerability) in a codebase. They'd find a good amount of them and fix them.

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.

MattPalmer1086• 29 days ago

Ahhh - you are talking about Adobe. I always wondered, given the never ending stream of vulnerabilities in their products, what it was about their development process that produced such appalling code in the first place.

bluGill4• 28 days ago

The hope is that LLMs can scan my code every day or something like that. If I make a mistake and get it past code review, the LLM will still find it and it gets fixed right away. (better yet, make LLM an automatic reviewer on everything).

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.

iririririr2• 29 days ago

thats is definitely NOT what the article says.

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.

pixlmint• 29 days ago

Once most of the bugs are fixed

my brother in christ, I hope you're actually trying to be funny here.

My_Name• 28 days ago

99 little bugs in the code

99 little bugs

take one down, patch it around

105 little bugs in the code...

himata41132• 29 days ago

This is where you're wrong, I ran an experiment and told it to find bugs in a ~200 LoC project. The models are tuned in a way to where they're expected to generate issue reports so a codebase that had zero bugs, zero vulnerabilities and zero changes needed it found 3 low severity issues (cosmetic) 1 medium severity issue and 1 critical severity issue. The critical severity issue was accepting unvalidated user input, for... an echo command.

esperent2• 29 days ago

Did you make any attempt at tuning the prompt to reduce false positives? Or did you just say "find bugs"? Because if you tell it to do that, it will.

jeroenhd• 29 days ago

LLMs are finding bugs where there aren't any and wasting human time trying to disprove the slop.

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.

entuno4• 28 days ago

There's an assumption in here that every developer is spending a load of money on the latest and most capable LLMs to scan for bugs in their code before every release.

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.

pwinnski• 28 days ago

It may be only a matter of time before all devs remember to append ", and make no mistakes" to the end of their LLM prompts, but I don't think we as an industry will ever reach a point at which every release of every package/library/application is scanned with the most capable model available.

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.

enraged_camel• 29 days ago

> 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.

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.

cpuguy833• 29 days ago

Plenty of people offended by closing a PR or issue unresolved.

naturalmovement• 29 days ago

Linus Torvalds once went on record saying security vulnerabilities are no more important than regular bugs.

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.

sans_souse• 29 days ago

I'm curious about people's experiences with Kalshi support in this context.

jamesjhare• 29 days ago

"LLMs are as good as almost any security researcher"

No they are not. Everything else can be safely ignored. The author is suffering from AI psychosis and needs to get some help.

_el1s72• 29 days ago

Everyone here is apparently, that's why you getting downvoted.

qbane• 29 days ago

LLMs are as good as almost any security researcher, and anyone can run them.

I wonder what the metrics are. Also, not "anyone", just the affordable.

jongjong• 29 days ago

I found a DoS vulnerability in Coinbase several months ago on Hacker One. It took me literally 30 minutes to find. First time I did this in my life. I could craft a message cheaply which, when sent as the HTTP payload to a specific endpoint, would cause the server to hang for a full 30 or so seconds before getting a response. I could have easily scaled up that attack, cheaply...

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.

rakel_rakel• 29 days ago

I read every piece like this one as: Money is moving in the vulnerability space now, when as before the LLM hype incentivized that, your best bet was that someone skilled enough would accept living with the financial insecurity of being a gig worker to hopefully stumble upon your projects bug bounty program. Is the bet here is that the hype lasts, and that people willingly will keeping on paying Dario to be able to contribute?

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.

aetherspawn• 29 days ago

LLMs find more vulnerabilities than people because people time is heaps more expensive than LLM time, that’s it.

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).

bluGill4• 28 days ago

Looking for bugs is boring. LLMs don't get bored the same way humans do. Thus even if you had infinite budget you should expect a LLM to be better.

maxignol• 29 days ago

In the end, sorting prs and vulnerabilities has been the same for open source maintainers. How about adding a credibility score to every github account ? Couldn’t that cut sorting times ?

dirkc• 29 days ago

These two bits stand out to me:

The security researchers are not special, the insight and confidentiality are

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

jupenur• 29 days ago

This whole blog post makes me sad. I've been active on both sides of the vulnerability disclosure process for well over a decade and have reported a whole bunch [1] of security bugs to the Go security team. I was there back when Filippo was running the show and have continued since Roland took over. My experience with the people there has always been great.

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

paddybyers2• 29 days ago

I wrote about this this morning [1]:

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...

FiloSottile2• 29 days ago

Thanks for the comment, I was actually hoping to get your take on this! I linked to it from the article.

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.

paddybyers2• 29 days ago

I've run a disclosure program for ~7 years, which is an open paid program. However, over that time we've developed relationships with the most active and successful contributors, to the point that we'll now give them early access to new features to try out (all still paid for on the basis of rewards for problems found). This is proving especially valuable now in triaging the new deluge of noise from impactful issues.

jybuilds• 29 days ago

I agree. Accoding to a security engineer I know, the impact of mythos is enormous.

mawadev• 29 days ago

I read a casual teams message from one consultant type of guy who said "the low level linux hackers who don't care about best practices, code quality and security get what they deserve". I don't know how to feel about this other than disgust. The entire space has been overrun by LLMs making stuff up or finding things that aren't critical while some roles capitalize on the fear. There is just so much wrong with saying such things in such a way, I couldn't describe.

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.

_el1s72• 29 days ago

LLMs are as good as almost any security researcher, and anyone4 can run them.

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.

iepathos• 29 days ago

"LLMs are as good as almost any security researcher"

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.

ivlad• 28 days ago

Really. Back in the days, the majority of “researchers” sent scan results. The term “beg bounty” didn’t come about for nothing.

zadg• 29 days ago

I think the main impact of this is that a successful career in vulnerability research is going to require a high level of proficiency in exploit development, as that's where the demonstrable real-world impact lies.

wobbat• 29 days ago

Honestly, even that is something LLMs are becoming scarily good at. Not all of it, but they have surprised me, including in terms of exploit development, more than I am comfortable with.

muldvarp• 29 days ago

Tech careers no longer exist. Tech jobs will still exist for a few years, but careers they will no longer be.

gib444• 29 days ago

I guess we now need AI tools to filter security report spam. I'll go out on a limb and say such products already exist.

vlindos• 29 days ago

Stella Ops has call paths, vulnerabilities classifications, VEX to mitigate most of these: https://stella-ops.org/features/

torginus• 29 days ago

I wonder if LLM's 'jagged intelligence' will come to bite here again. AI might be better at finding certain kind of bugs, to the degree outperfoming the best humans, but that doesn't mean a skilled human can't find an issue which is hard for LLMs incredibly easily.

alper• 29 days ago

Were they ever "special"?

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.

0x1622• 28 days ago

soo true

AmbroseBierce• 28 days ago

I honestly have no idea how the profession will look after that, so this whole post is more of a current observation than a long-term prediction.

My sweet summer child, the "profession" will become an agent managers talk directly to, like many other professions.

parasense• 28 days ago

Can anybody say what is going to happen? It's not a rhetorical question, and the implied or entailed context might involve a Nash equilibrium of some sort.

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.

Goofy_Coyote• 28 days ago

Security Eng here. The whole thing is an absolute mess. I’ve been (and still am) on both sides of the fence.

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)

PaulStatezny• 28 days ago

Ending on a doom-and-gloom note: there will be a reckoning.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?

philipwhiuk• 28 days ago

I imagine:

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

-mlv• 28 days ago

Have you considered using LLMs to perform some automated more-or-less reliable classification of incoming reports by severity, affected product, etc., then have agents try to replicate the reported findings?

Ideally the reports would also be coming in in the same structured format.

Retr0id• 28 days ago

I reported a fun security bug to Google recently (not high in CVSS terms but will probably make the HN front page when it goes public), and the report was auto-closed in minutes as "not reproducible". If they tried to use an LLM to reproduce it I'm not surprised, since it requires a soldering iron.

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.

ksajadi• 28 days ago

Cannot agree more. As part of our SOC2 we have to log and respond to all inbound vulnerability reports. Before it was easy to tell if a report was just a bounty hunter looking for a low hanging fruit. Now well crafted emails with seemingly legitimate disclosures take a lot of time to validate and triage.

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)

JohnMakin• 28 days ago

These kinds of posts act like there wasn't already a rich suite of automated security scanning tools available. The fact you can put them in a LLM's hand or point it at a codebase to do the exact same thing isn't really a big leap, the spam is. It's a bunch of amateurs thinking they can do work outside of the realm of their expertise now, and this trend isn't unique to security, you see it spreading across the various realms of expertise out there in the world. The world's slowly filling with slop, and CVE spam is a byproduct of that.

casey22• 28 days ago

Yet again it's <person who is not an X> saying that AI can replace the job of an X. Take a hint people, if AI can't replace your job it can't replace anyone elses'.

Vulnerability reports are not special anymore

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