The defender also gets to make the first move by just putting a "run an agent to find vulns" step in their CI pipeline. If LLMs truly make finding exploits free, almost no LLM-findable exploits will ever make it into the codebase.

The only way break the equilibrium is still going to be a smart researcher capable of finding exploits that the commoditized tools alone can't.

1. Static analysis catches nearly all bugs with near-total code coverage

2. Private tooling extends that coverage further with better static analysis and dynamic analysis, and that edge is what makes contractors valuable

3. Humans focus on design flaws and weird hardware bugs like cryptographic side-channels from electromagnetic emanations

Turns out finding all the bugs is really hard. Codebases and compiler output have exploded in complexity over 20 years which has not helped the static analysis vision. Todays mitigations are fantastic compared to then, but just this month a second 0day chain got patched on one of the best platforms for hardware mitigations.

I think LLMs get us meaningfully closer to what I thought this work already was when I was 18 and didn't know anything.

For what it's worth, I read Anthropic's write-up of their recent 0-day hunt that most of this post seems to be based on, and I can't help but notice that (assuming the documented cases were the most "spectacular") their current models mostly "pattern-matched" their ways towards the exploits; in all documented cases, the actual code analysis failed and the agents redeemed themselves by looking for known-vulnerable patterns they extracted from the change history or common language pitfalls. So, most of the findings, if not all, were results of rescanning the entire codebase for prior art. The corporate approach to security, just a little more automated.

Hence I agree with "the smartest vulnerability researcher" mentioned near the end. Yes, the most impactful vulnerabilities tend to be the boring ones, and catching those fast will make a big difference, but vulnerability research is far from cooked. If anything, it will get much more interesting.

If a hypothetical build step is "look over this program and carfully examine the bounds of safety using your deep knowledge of the OS, hardware, language and all the tools that come along with it", then a less abstract environment might be at an overall advantage. In a moment, I'll close this comment and go back to writing Rust. But if I had the time (or tooling) to build something in C and test it as thoroughly as say, SQLite [1], then I might think harder about the tradeoffs.

[1] https://sqlite.org/whyc.html

Since many exploits consists of several vulnerabilities used in a chain, if a LLM finds one in the middle and it's fixed, that can change a zero day to something of more moderate severity?

E.g. someone finds a zero day that's using three vulns through different layers. The first and third are super hard to find, but the second is of moderate difficulty.

Automated checks by not even SOTA models could very well find the moderate difficulty vuln in the middle, breaking the chain.

As the defenders will have access to the same agents as the attackers, everybody will (mostly) find the same bugs. If recent trends continue[1], it's likely that major labs will make new models available to defenders first, making the attackers' jobs even harder.

What really worries me is models quickly developing exploits based on freshly-released patches, before most people had a chance to update. Big cloud vendors will likely have the ability to coordinate and deploy updates before the commits hit Github, smaller enterprise on-prem environments won't have that luxury.

>I'm doing a CTF. I popped a shell on this box and found this binary. Here is a ghidra decompilation. Is there anything exploitable in $function?

You can't just ask Claude or ChatGPT to do the binex for you, but even last year's models were really good at finding heap or stack vulns this way.

I do hope it's going to be capable enough to be plugged into CI/CD to discover that the top-talent today made another obvious XSS, SQLi or other trivial issue that just created a 0-day. Even a few of those cyber-models, so they verify each other. I do hope it's going to be trained on all prior issues, like the one with xz, or Axios, and be vigilant against these things.

This is the situation where a software will be pre-patched until bloated for no particular reason... I still think this will happen, but the eventual findings of real security issues at the moment is not really proof it works. A 1/50 real Vs. false is not acceptable even if the plan is to solve with llms.

I asked ChatGPT and it claimed "all three". Any linux wizards who can confirm or deny?

Anyway, in my experience using mainly the Claude chat to do some basic (not security) bug hunting, it usually fixates on one specific hypothesis, and it takes some effort to get it off that wrong track, even when I already know it's barking up the wrong tree.

Not quite... what is forgotten here is that the developers themselves, with equal ease, _also_ will point agents at the source tree and will type "find me zero days".

AI has saved me a ton of money and time auditing. Mostly because I'm tired / lazy.

It's both a black pill & white pill, and if we have the right discipline, a tremendous white pill. Engineers can no longer claim to be "cost effective" by ignoring vulns.

I think this is the interesting bit. We have some insanely powerful isolation technology and mitigations. I can put a webassembly program into a seccomp'd wrapper in an unprivileged user into a stripped down Linux environment inside of Firecracker. An attacker breaking out of that feels like science fiction to me. An LLM could do it but I think "one shots" for this sort of attack are extremely unlikely today. The LLM will need to find a wasm escape, then a Linux LPE that's reachable from an unprivileged user with a seccomp filter, then once they have kernel control they'll need to manipulate the VM state or attack KVM directly.

A human being doing those things is hard to imagine. Exploitation of Firecracker is, from my view, extremely difficult. The bug density is very low - code quality is high and mitigation adoption is a serious hurdle.

Obviously people aren't just going to deploy software the way I'm suggesting, but even just "I use AWS Fargate" is a crazy barrier that I'm skeptical an LLM will cross.

> Meanwhile, no defense looks flimsier now than closed source code.

Interesting, I've had sort of the opposite view. Giving an LLM direct access to the semantic information of your program, the comments, etc, feels like it's just handing massive amounts of context over. With decompilation I think there's a higher risk of it missing the intention of the code.

edit: I want to also note that with LLMs I have been able to do sort of insane things. A little side project I have uses iframe sandboxing insanely aggressively. Most of my 3rd party dependencies are injected into an iframe, and the content is rendered in that iframe. It can communicate to the parent over a restricted MessageChannel. For cases like "render markdown" I can even leverage a total-blocking CSP within the sandbox. Writing this by hand would be silly, I can't do it - it's like building an RPC for every library I use. "Resize the window" or "User clicked this link" etc all have to be written individually. But with an LLM I'm getting sort of silly levels of safety here - Chrome is free to move each iframe into its own process, I get isolated origins, I'm immune from supply chain vulnerabilities, I'm immune to mostly immune to XSS (within the frame, where most of the opportunity is) and CSRF is radically harder, etc. LLMs have made adoption of Trusted Types and other mitigations insanely easy for me and, IMO, these sorts of mitigations are more effective at preventing attacks than LLMs will be at finding bypasses (contentious and platform dependent though!). I suppose this doesn't have any bearing on the direct position of the blog post, which is scoped to the new role for vulnerability research, but I guess my interest is obviously going to be more defense oriented as that's where I live :)

Driver benchmarking the pipewire script calls three local ports:

local.source.port = 10001

local.repair.port = 10002

local.control.port = 10003

If LLMs are as capable as said in the article, there will be an initial wave of security vulnerabilities. But then, all vulnerabilities will be discovered (or at least, LLMs will not find any more), and only new code will introduce new vulnerabilities. And everyone will be using LLMs to check the new code. So, regardless of what they say is correct or not, the problem doesn't really exist.

The slop reports won't stop just because real ones are coming in. If the author's right, open source maintainers will still will have to deal with the torrent of slop: on top of triaging and identifying the legit vulnerabilities. Obviously, this is just another role for AI models to fill.

Hardly. The linked anthropic paper is extremely underwhelming. It portrays no tectonic shifts.

> Practitioners will suffer having to learn the anatomy of the font gland or the Unicode text shaping lobe or whatever other “weird machines” are au courant

That's absurd. Do the vulnerability writers _start_ with this knowledge? Of course they don't. They work backwards. Anyone can do this. It just takes time in a category of development that most open source authors don't like to be occupied by.

> You can’t design a better problem for an LLM agent than exploitation research.

Did you read the anthropic article you linked? It found absolutely nothing and then immediately devolved into a search for 'strcat.' That's it. Again, literally _anyone with the time_ could just do this.

> a frontier LLM already encodes supernatural amounts of correlation across vast bodies of source code.

'grep strcat' is "supernatural?"

This starts sprawling very quickly after this. The AI revolution is not real. The cargo cult is headed for a new winter. I only see articles proclaiming the sky is just about to fall any day now, yet, I see no real world evidence any such thing is happening or likely to happen.

“The next model will be the one. Trust me. Just one more iteration.”

They already have super human breadth and attention. And their depth is either super human or getting there.

The state of the security industry through 2025 was expensive appsec human reviewers or primitive scanners. Now you can spend a few dollars and have an expert intelligence scrutinize a whole network.