alt Hacker NewsThis is very similar in root cause and exploitation to Copy Fail.
Which illustrates pretty well something that's lost when relying heavily on LLMs to do work for you: exploration.
I find that doing vulnerability research using AI really hinders my creativity. When your workflow consists of asking questions and getting answers immediately, you don't get to see what's nearby. It's like a genie - you get exactly what you asked for and nothing more.
The researcher who discovered Copy Fail relied heavily on AI after noticing something fishy. If he had to manually wade through lots of code by himself, he would have many more chances to spot these twin bugs.
At the same time, I'm pretty sure that by using slightly less directed prompting, a frontier LLM would found these bugs for him too.
It's a very unusual case of negative synergy, where working together hurt performance.
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Or a follow up prompt: "find similar classes of bugs". Once the actual case has been layed out finding like bugs isn't too hard. I hear you on the creativity bit. Like any tool, AI can put blinders on. Using it to augment without it fully taking over your workflow is tough.
I don't follow. LLMs spotted these bugs in the first place. You seem to be saying that these discoveries are indications that they're bad for vulnerability discovery.
Evidence or are you just riffing?
It’s very hard to see a root vuln similar to, but not the same as, another discovered by AI, as a lesson about AI not exploring.
Is there a counterfactual where you would say it explored well enough, besides both vulnerabilities published as one?
> When your workflow consists of asking questions and getting answers immediately, you don't get to see what's nearby.
That's why is very very important to just step out and use saved time to go for a walk, to a park, sit on a bench, listen do birds, close eyes and zoom out.
The state we are in is actually brilliant.
These are all page cache poisoning attacks (dirtyfrag, copyfail, dirtypipe). Maybe the page cache should have defense-in-depth measures for SUID binaries?
No, unless I'm misreading it it's the *same* root cause: high 32 bits of Extended ESN in IPsec == authencesn module/cipher mode.
The wrong thing got fixed for copy.fail, because people jumped to blame AF_ALG.
[ed.: yes it's the same authencesn issue. https://github.com/V4bel/dirtyfrag/blob/892d9a31d391b7f0fccb... it doesn't say authencesn in the code, only in a comment, but nonetheless, same issue.]
[ed.2: the RxRPC issue is separate, this is about the ESP one]