Comment by QuiEgo
1 day ago
I agree the wording is a bit alarmist, but a closer example to what they are saying is:
bool silly_mistake = false;
//... lots of lines of code
free(x);
//... lots of lines of code
if (silly_mistake) { // silly_mistake shown to be false at this point in the program in all testing, so far
free(x);
}
A bug like above would still be something that would be patched, even if a way to exploit it has not yet been found, so I think it's fair to call out (perhaps with less sensationalism).
FWIW there's a whole boutique industry around finding these. People have built whole careers around farming bug bounties for bugs like this. I think they will be among the first set of software engineers really in trouble from AI.
That is something a good static analyser or even optimising compiler can find ("opaque predicate detection") without the need for AI, and belongs in the category of "warning" and nowhere near "exploitable". In fact a compiler might've actually removed the unreachable code completely.
Well yeah, it’s a toy example to illustrate a point in an HN discussion :).
Imagine “silly mistake” is a parameter, and rename it “error_code” (pass by reference), put a label named “cleanup” right before the if statement, and throw in a ton of “goto cleanup” statements to the point the control flow of the function is hard to follow if you want it to model real code ever so slightly more.
It will be interesting to see the bugs it’s actually finding.
It sounds like they will fall into the lower CVE scores - real problems but not critical.
That's what I'm saying; a static analyser will be able to determine whether the code and/or state is reachable without any AI, and it will be completely deterministic in its output.
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