Local privilege escalation vulnerabilities in Linux

https://openai.com/index/a-thousand-fewer-paths-to-root/

21•dangelosaurus•50m ago

Comments

dangelosaurus•45m ago

This is my team’s work. I’m happy to try to answer questions or take questions back to the team.

And we're hiring! https://openai.com/careers/search/?q=cyber

BoppreH•34m ago

It's a bittersweet result, like finding asbestos in your house. I'd rather know than not, but I would much prefer not having it in the first place.

I understand this work was based on a dated snapshot. Will there be any continuous effort, scanning new PRs as they land, to prevent new weaknesses from being added?

ky1ebot1337•4m ago

(I am the author the pipeline, just created an account to answer some questions :D) My goal is to work towards a vuln-free Internet. What I observed is that stronger models can find many more vulnerabilities that weaker models cannot. If compute permits (there are other projects to secure besides Linux), I plan to scan Linux again with every newer generation of cyber models.

farisght•22m ago

I wish these blog posts included statistics on the categories of deficiencies that cause these vulnerabilities, and proposed measures to avoid them

A system that admits THOUSANDS of such vulnerabilities is certainly flawed in several fundamental aspects

konaraddi•18m ago

As models get more advanced and generate an increasing throughput of increasingly higher quality results, how are you determining when to trust its results and when human review is needed on what?

E.g., 948 results is a high number to review in a timely manner unless your team is very large or spending several months combing through the results

EDIT: nvm i shouldve kept reading, answered

> At this scale, manually investigating every report is impractical for our research team. We therefore focused on validating findings that a) were reachable by a low-privileged user, b) required no special capabilities, and c) produced measurable evidence of memory corruption.

zahlman•24m ago

> We've developed an autonomous vulnerability discovery, exploitation, and patching pipeline. In one run with our cyber model, it validated and generated patches for 948 local privilege escalation vulnerabilities in Linux at an API cost of $1.2 million.

Imagine if open-source organizations other than the Linux Foundation (and Mozilla I guess) could throw $1.2M of API-rate LLM usage at security.

getcrunk•20m ago

> For the near and medium term, having access to a low-privileged account on an operating system, that isn’t up-to-date on its latest available patches should be considered functionally equivalent to root access for a well-resourced threat actor.

*buries head in sand*

*cries*

Plasmoid•14m ago

How did we get to the point where there are a thousand privilege escalation exploits in the kernel?

Is the kernel simply too complex to reason about? Is it an underlying flaw in the security model or language implementation?

Should we assume that all software is more compromised than the kernel?

antonvs•10m ago

> How did we get to the point where there are a thousand privilege escalation exploits in the kernel?

We developed AIs that can find them.

nas•5m ago

I've always considered local escalations to be possible in Linux (i.e. having user access almost certainly means you can get root). However, 948 vulnerabilities is kind of shocking. Hopefully we are getting to the end of the part where it "gets worse before it gets better".

tamimio•4m ago

These are becoming more and more marketing materials than actual findings, because OAI probably hit the wall in making their models smarter (just like how google try to specialize their models in legal or whatever), but they need to remain relevant in the news. Sol 6.1 sucked so bad in reasoning that either it’s actually a bad model or users behind the scenes get degraded outcome while using all the resources for these marketing stunts. Stop, it’s embarrassing, make better models or be gone, at least we will get cheaper RAM to advance the development of open weights models.

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Comments

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