I do about a monthly update of my Debian machines. Today I did the usual monthly update and noticed loads of packages uploading from the “security” branch. I’ve had the impression (just an impression) that more and more packages are being updated from security over the past many months. Trixie has been out for a while now and I would have thought that less and less updates should be coming from security. Has anyone had this sensation and if so has anyone linked this to AI finding more holes in OSS that would have normally been found by human scrutiny? Has there been any official research into this? And if this is true, does it mean that we have been running insecure software all along? Or is there is there a risk that AI start filing patches that actually make it less secure because software maintainers are not being rigorous in verifying who is submitting the patch? AI must be changing the paradigm of software development more than any other area of our lives and I can’t still work out if in a better way or not.
I don’t think anyone has mentioned this yet, but the idea of AI hacking tools has also led to a lot more human effort in finding and fixing security issues.
A while back there was an article about AI security tools and something about over 200 security vulnerabilities patched (perhaps in Chrome?). But in the detail of the article, it mentioned only 4 were found by AI. The rest were found by humans trying to get there before people with AI tools found them.