When Mythos was first announced, pretty much every security expert I talk to freaked directly out. A significant portion of my job now revolves around mitigating the impact of AI-generated exploits.
The rate at which we're churning out AI-generated code is going to make this worse, too, because AI-generated code is kind of notoriously terrible at security.
(What a wonderful new world we live in)
They approve your code, gold, if not; back to the coding machine and minus 1000 human tokens. This will be done via the implants of brain chips
You're forced to write syntax that appeases the tester. If they are not happy you need to return and rewrite.
As software engineering matures, we're adding more linting and static checkers in codebases. This is generally considered good.
that's called the write/compile/check loop
but if suddenly it's ai, people freakout at having to do this?
The article cites this commercial blog patting themselves on the back how they detect the exploit, yet after reading it I don't see any actual exploiting? Is scanning/probing the same as active exploitation all of a sudden?
[0]: https://ellio.tech/en/blog/php2shell-what-we-observed-and-wh...
I see a world in which we all get some generous Dependabot 2.0 on large forges because leaving so much software insecure otherwise is untenable, but once the software is not iterating a billion times a week, you're not introducing new classes of bugs just sitting there.
You can have a frontier security model pentesting your program every night while you sleep and you can wake up knowing that whatever happens, you did the best you could.
And on the positive side, LLMs make remediation much easier too. It took me around 15 minutes and a few dimes worth of DeepSeek tokens to upgrade some gnarly, janky, exploitable PHP 7.x code to the latest fully patched version of 8.3 today. Without LLMs, I would probably have been having a serious discussion about whether we should ditch the app entirely instead.
The caveat being that most software never matures. Maybe it's a cynical take, but virtually all software I use regularly is updated at least once a month. Right now, I'm using Chrome, and I see the "Relaunch to update" button waiting for me to press it. I see the arrow on the Ollama icon telling me I have to relaunch it to apply updates. I have Visual Studio Code running next to my browser, and two extensions need to be restarted to apply updates.
But at least somebody is maintaining that software.
>as bad as things have gotten in the past 4 days, they are going to get a lot worse before they get better. security leaders, never let a crisis go to waste: please go to your boards and ask for help right now. not for ai, for the basics. (we need to hold on for ~18 months.)
So yes.
The same with "crypto" to refer to cryptocoins instead of cryptography.
Ah, wit is alive and strong!
Anyone who has ever implemented a regex engine, I would imagine. Regex has always been a security nightmare, especially due to persistent attempts to use regexes to validate untrusted input
Quality and Security are emergent properties of software - especially when considering software-as-deployed in the real world.
And the problems with "good taste" and good architecture and data modelling - will probably leave ai code open to a lot of issues (Claude code cli issues is a great example of how bad this can get).
Having good architects in charge can help - but it requires a lot of discipline to keep the feature set small so that maintaining quality and security become feasible.
Having tests / CI pipelines, etc are the same thing? Now you can choose to add a cheap step in your pipeline checking if e.g. some engineer did something stupid like allow SQL injections.
The floor of software quality once it gets to review is permanently raised.
Most the cyber security people I know were upset once llms came out that could do basic os int and author their own emails, and mimic speech/video. That's how the majority of real losses occur. No one even talks about it. It's mind numbing hearing about the zebras and unicorns when there are 10 billion ants entering houses a year. Exotic stuff sells...
Now lots of sane people are genuinely and correctly worried that turning all engineers into 24/7 sloppers is and will continue to make the world far more exploitable. That's the real risk as far as I can tell
My experience with AI-code is that it's extremely defensive and good at minimizing 'obvious' mistakes.
Are we comparing to old models generating code? Or mythos-class models?
There are still folks, many of them, who think that time to market is everything, and anything beside it should be ignored. "It compiles? Ship it!" is a phrase from 1990s; LLMs just make this approach much easier. We will have plenty of machine-generated software with the security posture of a colander hit by a buckshot.
The issue then is that most people aren't actually good at keeping an eye out for security issues in code proactively, so things slip through the cracks (whether human-written or not), just at a much accelerated pace.
> Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant based on OpenAI's codex-davinci-002 model wrote significantly less secure code than those without access.
That model came out in March 2022, it's GPT-3.5 !!!
I'm sorry but it's absurd to use that as evidence for anything related to AI coding today.
You can't just hedge by saying "it's somewhat older". It's like discussing dunno a new train connection between cities and citing a paper measure steam locomotives.
I think most people writing code with AI nowadays will find it's still lacking in some areas. Not because the model isn't good (definitely miles ahead than what we had access to in 2022-2023), just because it wasn't actively mentioned and so the model skipped over it. The same will apply to security.
Not only this, a significant number of developers have stopped looking at code, trusting the bots. I've seen major security regressions, bot rolled auth implementations, and falsified benchmarks... just this last week, all in projects that get hyped.
Rule #2 - do not blindly trust Ai output
I think this was true in the past but AI is helping us finding exploits which have been in our code for many years. All out there by humans. We’re seeing fewer customer reported issues, and despite the pen tests getting far more rigorous, we’re passing all of them. Obviously this is one data point, but I’m hearing similar things from my friends in security and ops.
roenxi•45m ago
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.
ninkendo•30m ago
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”.
clivedup•28m ago
> > 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.
MadrasTh0rn•26m ago
I wouldn't challenge fate like this.