logoalt Hacker News

lwhi • today at 10:26 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

Can bug finding lead to harm?

A single bad actor trying to find a bug in order to achieve a specific aim, might mean that bug is never known by the software creator. However the majority of the public is also likely to not know about the bug.

Public hunting and exposure via security advisories, it's going to lead to a greater awareness of vulnerabilities which I imagine will increase the likelihood of a particular vulnerability being exploited.

The time and effort required to fix a vulnerability is often substantial.

Perhaps we shouldn't be categorical, in our assessment of the merit in finding vulnerabilities in software?


Replies

spwa4 • today at 10:32 AM

The problem is economic. This necessitates constant effort to just keep software working, and that means the client needs to pay for that. And there's effort after effort after effort to force the software provider to pay for that.

https://www.ibanet.org/European-Product-Liability-Directive-...

Under these circumstances, of course, nobody has any incentive to find bugs, and everyone goes after people who find bugs.

But this is how the government (at least in EU) designed the system, not how it's supposed to work. It's yet another difference with the US, and it's yet another way US business (or Chinese, or any NON-EU business) get preferential treatment in EU business.

dist-epoch • today at 11:05 AM

LLMs can find endless combinations of edge cases that are a real bug. Addressing them requires thousands more lines of code. Which creates another set of new edge cases to combine.

At some point you realize recovery is better then prevention, let the bugs happen, but recover from them gracefully.

➕ show 1 reply