• Vulnerability Research Is Cooked (sockpuppet.org)

    From LWN.net@618:250/24 to All on Wed Apr 1 06:40:09 2026
    There is a
    blog post on sockpuppet.org arguing that we are not prepared for the
    upcoming flood of high-quality, LLM-generated vulnerability reports and exploits.

    Now consider the poor open source developers who, for the last 18
    months, have complained about a torrent of slop vulnerability
    reports. I'd had mixed sympathies, but the complaints were at least
    empirically correct. That could change real fast. The new models
    find real stuff. Forget the slop; will projects be able to keep up
    with a steady feed of verified, reproducible, reliably-exploitable
    sev:hi vulnerabilities? That's what's coming down the pipe.

    Everything is up in the air. The industry is sold on memory-safe
    software, but the shift is slow going. We've bought time with
    sandboxing and attack surface restriction. How well will these
    countermeasures hold up? A 4 layer system of sandboxes, kernels,
    hypervisors, and IPC schemes are, to an agent, an iterated version
    of the same problem. Agents will generate full-chain exploits, and
    they will do so soon.

    Meanwhile, no defense looks flimsier now than closed source
    code. Reversing was already mostly a speed-bump even for
    entry-level teams, who lift binaries into IR or decompile them all
    the way back to source. Agents can do this too, but they can also
    reason directly from assembly. If you want a problem better suited
    to LLMs than bug hunting, program translation is a good place to
    start.

    https://lwn.net/Articles/1065586/
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