: Hackpocalypse deferred

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/28915273

[…]

That marketing may have outstripped reality. Early reports from Mythos preview users including AWS and Mozilla indicate that while the model is very good and very fast at finding vulnerabilities, and requires less hands-on guidance from security engineers - making it a welcome time-saver for the human teams - it has yet to eclipse human security researchers.

“So far we’ve found no category or complexity of vulnerability that humans can find that this model can’t,” Mozilla CTO Bobby Holley said, after revealing that Mythos found 271 vulnerabilities in Firefox 150. Then he added: “We also haven’t seen any bugs that couldn’t have been found by an elite human researcher.” In other words, it’s like adding an automated security researcher to your team. Not a zero-day machine that’s too dangerous for the world.

  • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
    30·
    2 days ago

    Another researcher, Davi Ottenheimer, pointed out that the security section (Section 3, pages 47-53) of Anthropic’s 244-page documentation “contains no count of zero-days at all. With no CVE list, no CVSS distribution, no severity bucket, no disclosure timeline, no vendor-confirmed-novel table, no false-positive rate.”

    excerpts from the summary of the post linked in “Devanash ultimately concluded”, a lot of which Register repeats (which I think is a good thing since the copyediting makes the language a lot more accessible and wide-reaching and of course it was credited):

    The bugs are real. 17-year-old FreeBSD RCE, 23-year-old Linux kernel heap overflow, 27-year-old OpenBSD TCP flaw. LLMs catch these because they can reason about the gap between what code does and what the developer intended. Fuzzers and static analysis literally cannot do this.

    The coverage is wrong on almost every detail. The “181 Firefox exploits” ran with the browser sandbox ( yes, the thing that stops browser exploits) off. The FreeBSD exploit transcript shows substantial human guidance, not autonomy. The “thousands of severe vulnerabilities” extrapolates from 198 manually reviewed reports. The Linux kernel bug was found by Opus 4.6, the public model, not Mythos.

    The moat is thinner than anyone reported. AISLE tested eight models including a 3.6B model at $0.11/M tokens. All eight found the FreeBSD bug. Mythos’s actual lead is in multi-step exploit development, not detection. That’s a narrower and more replicable advantage than what’s being sold.