cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/28915273
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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.
Speaking generally…
One is that it was pitched as a superhuman AI that could think in ways humans couldn’t possibly imagine, escaping any security measure we might think to bond it with. That was the calibrated expectation.
Instead it’s fine at security “findings”, that a human could have noticed if they actually looked. For a lot of AI this is the key value prop, looking when a human can’t be bothered to look and seeing less than a human would, but the human never would have looked. For example a human can more reliably distinguish a needle from a straw of hay, but the relentless attention of an AI system would be a more practical approach for finding needles in haystacks. It will miss some needles and find some hay, so a human effort would have been better, but the AI is better than nothing, especially with a human to discard the accidental hay.
Another thing is the nuance of the “vulnerabilities” may be very underwhelming. Anyone who has been in the security world knows that the vast majority of reported “vulnerabilities” are nothing burgers in practice. Curl had a “security” issue where a malicious command line could make it lock up instead of timeout if the peer stops responding. I’ve seen script engines that were explicitly designed to allow command execution get cves because a 4gb malicious script could invoke commands without including the exec directive, and also this engine is only ever used by people with unfettered shell access anyway. Had another “critical” vulnerability, but required an authorized user to remove and even rewrite the code that listens to the network to allow unsanitized data in that’s normally caught by the bits they disabled. Curl had another where they could make it output vulnerable c code, then the attacker would “just” have to find a way to compile the output of the command and they’d have a vulnerable c executable… How in the world are they able to get curl to generate c code and compile it but not otherwise be able to write whatever c code they want… Well no one can imagine it, but hey, why not a CVE…