alt Hacker News> Is this the new cyber normal?
No. We're in a "brief" [0] transition period where a scaleable superhuman developer enters the scene and discovers a whole heap of bugs. Once the majority of code is written by similar systems then the tide of critical bugs being found will slow down.
The article does sorta say this but lets not bury the lede to deeply. It isn't realistic to expect new security vulnerabilities to be found at this rate, we're clearing out years of backlog and the maintainers haven't had time to deploy AI to do the software right the first time. Once the situation stabilises I'd personally expect very few public vulnerabilities because the expertise in how to assess code security is moving from a handful of experts to everyone.
> The NHS approach: close source everything.
Yeah good luck. I've seen how these systems work at decompiling and I expect they're probably going to be really good at fuzzing too.
[0] Could take a while.
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>It isn't realistic to expect new security vulnerabilities to be found at this rate
I wouldn't challenge fate like this.
+1. There aren't an infinite amount of serious security vulnerabilities out there.
> > The NHS approach: close source everything.
> Yeah good luck. I've seen how these systems work at decompiling and I expect they're probably going to be really good at fuzzing too.
Me too. The agents are much faster if it has access to source. NHS would have been easy hunting grounds. Now at least they don't stand out.
"a system should be secure, even if everything about the system—except the key—is public knowledge"
Should indeed, but we've all been caught with our pants down.
> Once the majority of code is written by similar systems then the tide of critical bugs being found will slow down.
I don’t know if this necessarily follows. I repeatedly see that AI will write code, then you have it audit the code for security vulnerabilities, and it still finds them. Just because AI can find bugs doesn’t mean it will write bug-free code. AI’s know how to take shortcuts to achieve their goals, and do it all the time.
Yes, you can have another AI audit the first AI’s code, but in practice this doesn’t always happen, especially because once the human gets their hands on the finished product, they don’t always take the extra step to ensure it’s audited. This is particularly true because people seem to think “well the AI wrote it in the first place, why would it find its own bugs?”, ignoring that context is everything, and an AI being asked to find bugs is going to approach the code a lot differently than an AI tasked with adding features.
That’s not to say it’s not possible to set things up properly into multi-agent stages with QA and security as first-class phases of development… I only mean to say that it’s not automatically true that “AI can find bugs” implies “AI doesn’t produce bugs”.