Vulnerability reports are not special anymore(words.filippo.io) |
Vulnerability reports are not special anymore(words.filippo.io) |
Occasionally I see real security researchers on HN complaining that no one takes the disclosure seriously, or that people reply immediately with a cease and desist. But from the receiving end it's just because the spam is unmanageable.
It's hard to spot the stuff that actually matters.
Hopefully at the end of this decade, a ton of software practices have been overhauled to eliminate classes of problems. Memory-safe language use is a great start - but it’d be great to see innovation in checking for TOCTOU problems, improper/missing authn & authz, and many others.
This is an engineering problem. It won’t be solved by models that “only do dumb shit 1/10th as often, only 0.01% of the time now not 0.1%!” It won’t be solved by adding more models to do even more double-checking before and after the work. It won’t be solved by hoping humans catch it in review. It isn’t solvable by adding outer loops of any sort - though we may get close. To truly solve this will take serious CS research.
Personally i have some doubts, a lot of research has gone into the idea without much to show for it, but its a very reasonable research area.
> A requirement for staying sane while working in public as an open source maintainer is realizing that every issue, PR, and piece of feedback is a present, not an obligation. You can accept it, ignore it, and use it partially or not at all.
> Except…
> For years, as lead of the Go Security team at the time, I’ve told new team members that it doesn’t apply to vulnerability reports. No, vulnerability reports are special. Security researchers are doing us a favor by reporting things confidentially instead of doing full disclosure, so we owe them something, which is not true of regular issues opened on the issue tracker.
[...]
> It’s 2026 and none of the premises are true anymore.
I respectfully disagree.
The premise is absolutely still true: if someone discovers a critical, exploitable vulnerability in your software, the impact and tradeoffs are exactly the same as they were before LLMs started finding bugs. There are just more of them now, so they're easier to come by.
But that won't last forever, either. As LLMs find increasingly difficult-to-find vulnerabilities, there will be fewer of them to report. This is just chugging through the backlog.
All of that said, I don't think finding vulnerabilities has really been the difficult security problem for most companies (or open source projects). The difficult problem is dedicating resources to fixing those vulnerabilities instead of building software, products, and/or infrastructure that people want. That problem is absolutely still here today, but I'm optimistic that agentic security developers will be able to take the burden off of development teams in the near future.
For tokens, of course.
I think your logic is partly correct but the fact that the same LLMs are allowing an exponential increase in insecure code generated is a counterbalancing point. I do not think this phenomena will slow down.
I think the point is those issues are now easily discoverable and are nearly public because of it.
It’s tough staying motivated on a craft when an AI is nearly as good as you. Chess players manage to do it at least.
The 5 on earth still getting paid to play chess?
but like, if you mean literally "someone gave them money and they played a game of chess", the number becomes much bigger. Chess coaches, streamers, club instructors, exhibition players, league players, camp counselors, and titled players receiving appearance fees, etc. All told, you're looking at ten's of thousands across the world.
The _demonstration_ of security impact through vulnerability reports was special. The automation of “demonstration of impact” with AI isn’t that at all. The last mile is human and always was. This isn’t to say it won’t change in the future, but that’s a fact of where we are now.
Vulnerability reports aren’t special anymore. They never were. It was the impact, the demonstration, the communication that was special.
When you realize that this is being written from the perspective of someone who does vulnerability reporting in a professional capacity, you’ll connect the dots. We took care to be kind and succinct because for many of us, we learned our skills from being on the development side of things first.
Vulnerability reports aren’t special anymore. The only ones that felt special were the ones with human touch, the ones doing their job as an adversarial thinker, and taking the care to understand that net positive outcomes require coordination even if both parties don’t see eye to eye.
Nothing has changed. It never was. You’re just inundated with AI slop; which as a practitioner who uses AI regularly I can say with absolute confidence. The end result is the same, the volume is increased, but the special thing was never the report itself.
Finding a vulnerability was always the easy but high toil part. It was the care to communicate succinctly and be invested in the outcome that was special.
Godspeed.
I’ve been screaming this from the rooftops. Impact is what was always important. No one is going to take down prod to do an emergency patch on an RCE that COULD NEVER ACTUALLY BE EXPLOITED.
I feel like we’re witnessing the result of multiple roles suddenly becoming security aware but not having the background or understanding to make any sense of it.
One flipside to this is that, because many of these bugs are "shallow" to LLMs, it's actually easier than ever to moderate the worst participants in your vulnerability program -- if someone sends you slop, you can just ban them and wait for the next, better orchestrated LLM to send you a better report for the same vulnerability.
Is this even a question? You triage and fix the vulnerability just like any other one. Are truths spoken by folks one dislikes — even for perfectly valid reasons — any less true?
The only way I can imagine this somehow applying is if someone has a habit of reporting vulnerabilities which do not exist, or of exaggerating their severity. Is crying wolf a CoC violation? If so, then I can imagine that particular sort of bad behaviour justifying some consideration before acting on a report.