The VibeSec Reckoning

54 points by HieronymusBosch 4 hours ago | 16 comments

Something worth noting is that the types of vulnerabilities LLMs introduce are notably different from what humans introduce, way fewer local issues like syntax mistakes, simple memory problems, etc and far more broad issues like authn/authz

Foobar8568 3 hours ago |

First so called vulnerability, isn't how a lot platforms are actually built? Share a link/copy a link, and more often than not, I am sure to have read a warning like "anyone with that link may access that file".

Now should I mention all the screw up I have seen in several Saas 1b+ valuation, including DocuSign/ and more security oriented ones (PIM related etc?).

For any softwares, you need a minimum critical mindset and experiences that you don't usually see.

est 2 hours ago |

There are basically two kinds of people in the world, ones that create stuff, and ones that destroys stuff.

Defense is a toally different game, and requires a complete new mindset than creativity. Security is something that you miss one then you lose all.

AIs are good at choosing a good candidate based on a reward model, but it sucks hard at enumerating mundane attack surfaces and make combinations to exploit through.

beardedwizard 2 hours ago | |

Good engineering is good engineering. Belief that someone else uniquely possesses the skill to engineer some critical part of a system you built is, for me, just abdicating responsibility. It's a learned helplessness.

Someone else blindly operating an llm on a corpus you created with an llm is comical.

drfloyd51 1 hour ago | | |

Are you the best choice to engineer everything your system does? There is no one in your company that might do a better job than you for a specific part of the system?

There is nothing wrong with asking for help or bouncing ideas of people with stronger skills.

I still have the responsibility to code XYZ well. But I don’t have to do it in a clean room.

frangonf 54 minutes ago |

Isn't this the dream? Let marketing ship and own their features while swe do the engineering?

bcjdjsndon 3 hours ago |

Vibe coding into production? You don't need to wait for scientists to produce research to know that's not a great idea.

You played yaself

mountainriver 2 hours ago | |

We do it, it’s fine. From what I can tell just about every company does it now.

Review your code, have integration tests, rollout feature incrementally with feature flags.

All the things we previously did for all the really bad human developers which AI is way better than

zarzavat 1 hour ago | | |

As far as I understand the terminology, if you're reviewing all the code then it's not "vibecoding" but just normal agent-based coding. Vibe coding has a strong implication for me that the code is not being read (hence the "vibe").

_pdp_ 3 hours ago |

We will learn the hard way... like always.

ryanmcbride 2 hours ago | |

More likely we simply won't learn. Or at least, the people in charge won't.

et1337 3 hours ago |

> prompting for test-driven development is not the same as enforcing code coverage thresholds in your build tool

Are they actually different? I would guess they have roughly the same efficacy. 100% code coverage means nothing, and this is especially true with LLMs.

juancn 2 hours ago |

It's not just the prompting to avoid issues, you also need to make the AI take an adversarial role and generate a feedback loop.

kibwen 1 hour ago |

> prompting your AI to “be secure” is not enough

I mean, yes, but I suppose we live in such a nonsensically thoughtless time that stating the obvious has some value.

> To combat this we need to write a security context file to guide the AI

And you've already lost the plot. The problem is not that you're pulling the arm of the slot machine without wearing your lucky underwear, the problem is that you're delegating security to the slot machine to begin with. Pack it up, you're done.

adamddev1 3 hours ago |

> "To combat this we need to write a security context file to guide the AI, be cautious with AI permission requests, create a daily security intelligence feed, and provide builders with a secure-by-default harness and templates."

Edit: To combat this we need to actually write and understand our code.

comandillos 3 hours ago |

I mean, isn't introducing safety guardrails as part of the system prompt actually a REALLY bad idea? This way you basically fully rely on the model to follow the rule, but its clear that even frontier models like Opus will start ignoring these things after a certain context length...

In our company we are just running agents inside isolated containers with isolated network access so it cannot even SSH or fuck up anything even if it gets access into it... That's the only and safest way... inconvenient, true, but the only safe option.

PS: At the same time I've observed this way actually people uses the agent in a more reasonable way, e.g. producing helper scripts to help them with their daily stuff, produce very specific things, create simple PoCs, but they don't commit to vibe-code all the functionality in their corresponding software products.