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.
Not entirely true. You get a lot more useful things from the bots when they are driven with people with a lot of experience. The problem that’s coming now is a magnified version of the “skript kiddiez” from early Google days where inexperienced people could just find exploits on the web and copy-paste them. Today, the LLMs actually can find vulns and develop exploits for people who don’t have any knowledge of the languages the exploits are being written in.
From my perspective, your data is out of date. I’ve been tracking the “usefulness” of frontier models in accelerating development speed for experienced people over the past 2 years. Two years ago, total waste of time. One year ago - equivocal, sometimes it accelerates an implementation, sometimes not. Six months ago, it was clearly helping more than hurting in most cases, and it has only continued to improve since then.
Knowing what you are doing helps. Trusting that the LLM will help, helps - if you set out to show it’s a waste of time, a waste of time it will be. Lately, treating the LLM like a consultant, just hired, likely to disappear any day, helps. Take the time to run all the formal processes, develop the requirements documentation, tests, etc. Yes, that “slows things down” but not in the long run across realistic project life cycles - even with humans doing the work. Also along those lines: keep designs modular, with modules of reasonable complexity - monolithic monster blocks of logic don’t maintain well for people either. LLM implementations start falling apart when their effective context windows get exceeded (and, in truth, people do too.)