In case you haven't been in the cybersecurity news lately, here's a quick summary: discoveries and exploits of high-profile software vulnerabilities are becoming faster than ever, in part due to AI-assisted code scanning tools. For example, most every Linux distribution recently found itself on the wrong end of the Copy Fail and Dirty Frag privilege escalation vulnerabilities (gaining administrator access with a local account), for which patches hadn't been made widely available as there wasn't enough time between their disclosure and publication.

The crux of the matter is the fact that although a bot isn't necessarily any smarter than a human at programming or hunting for security vulnerabilities, a LLM that can do so at full mental capacity 24/7 and is brutally effective at pattern recognition (built with pattern recognition, if we must). The vast majority of security exploits are rooted in specific bad programming habits, something a bot excels at noticing quickly and repeatedly.

Both aforementioned exploits for the Linux kernel took advantage of insecure zero-copy mechanisms (performing calculations on data in-place instead of copying/calculating/replacing). In both cases, although the issues were communicated to the kernel team in advance, they were made public far before the usual 90-day period — just over a week, in the case of Dirty Frag.

Although nobody said it out loud, the general assumption was that white-hat reveals were done with little to no advance warning because the exploits were already in the wild, so there was nothing to gain and everything to lose by keeping them under wraps.

To illustrate this point, Anand presents one of his own bug reports to an unnamed e-shop, wherein he found and reported an unpatched security bug that would let attackers buy expensive items for the princely sum of $0. Much to his surprise, he got a reply stating that 10 (!) other researchers had already reported the issue over six weeks. Conferring with a colleague, they noticed that "LLM-assisted hunters were converging on the same bugs almost simultaneously."

This conclusion is further backed up by triage engineer @d0rsky, who notes that once a new vulnerability is found, he immediately sees "a wave of duplicate reports within days." Quite poignantly, Dorsky posits: "if researchers can replicate these findings so quickly, what's stopping black-hats from doing the same before the issue is fixed?" Anand further drives the point home by saying he made an exploit for a published and patched vulnerability in the React framework in just 30 minutes using LLM tools.

In his conclusion, Anand doesn't mince words, stating that in this new world where non-ethical hackers can so quickly analyze code using AI, the 90-day window protects nobody, and that the usual monthly patch cycles are equally dead, as "[the] 30 day window between vulnerability and fix assumes attackers are slower than your release train." He urges developers to treat "every critical security issue as P0 and fix it immediately," as they can assume that said vulnerability is already under active exploitation. To wit, "if you are reading CVE descriptions while attackers are reading git log --diff-filter=M, you are already behind."

Ironically enough, open-source software enjoys high security standards due to code being publicly available for scrutiny and correction, but LLMs are turning that characteristic into a double-edged sword. Having said that, in the OSS world, a patch can also be created and distributed within hours, something the Mozilla team recently proved by posting 423 security fixes in April alone.

As for closed-source software, well, let's just say that tireless bots are equally good at decompiling and network scanning as they are at source code analysis, and it's likely enough that Microsoft, Apple, or Google will have their Copy Fail moments sooner rather than later. Do read the entirety of Anand's post, as it's quite elucidative.

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Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.