Comment by adrianN
4 hours ago
There is a finite number of rces that LLMs can find. We‘re in for a rough couple of years but on the other side of the transition we‘ll have more secure software stacks. I’d rather that everyone got the full capabilities and we’d weed out the bugs quickly than restricting LLMs for all but three letter agencies.
> There is a finite number of rces that LLMs can find.
This is a factor in favor of stability/security of software, but there are many others against:
- software (code) changes all the time, so there are windows of opportunity during which a bug is exploitable; in addition to that, a bug may take a relatively long time to be fixed
- a model used for attack may be stronger than the model used for defense, both in terms of model quality and compute allocated
- with software complexity increasing (and team/companies behind projects getting bigger), the margin for mistakes grows thinner, and introducing misconfigurations or weaknesses becomes exponentially easier (with "exponentially", I mean literally, because the interdependence of the components, both technical and human)
And last but not least: in general, attackers are more skilled than defenders; in best case, defenders are well-trained. And the idea of having the population of potential skilled attackers growing is very unsettling.
What makes you think RCEs are being found & fixed at a rate that’s faster than they’re being introduced?
I could see it going either way.
Why would the model not find the vulnerability during implementation or testing before release?
If it requires a lot of compute and trying, this is something that could be provided for common software.
Sad that this could well be that the path to OpenAI and Anthropic profitability of this arms race between defending LLM white hatting a company’s website and the black hat LLMs attacking it?
So the whole thing is forcing the good guys to outspend on tokens to preemptively defend against the risk of the bad guys outspending them on tokens, rather than buying tokens to actually add features to the product etc.
So are they creating a market for the solution by helping create the problem? A kind of rent-seeking AI security-industrial complex!!
8 replies →
Because it's far cheaper to to not spend the tokens finding the vulnerabilities, and software is now being created and released magnitudes faster than ever before. I could see the huge software companies maybe having fewer vulnerabilities, but I expect to see so much more in the smaller side of things.
The surface of potential issues is growing with complexity of all connected parts of the system. That applies to not only software. To prevent issues you either spend proportional amount (dollars, tokens, hours) on testing or reduce complexity of the system.
Because people need to spend time and money on that, which they won’t. The implementation is cheap, the review and follow-up is not (speaking from a pure LLM only workflow). My ratio is around 1:2 currently, so twice as much time spent fixing vs building.
> it requires a lot of compute
This is one reason
> and trying
and this is the other.
Those companies that produce more RCEs than they close will sink and those that don’t won’t.
If customers actually cared about this, Microsoft would’ve gone bust 20 years ago.
This assumes we don't create other bugs/vulnerabilities while fixing the existing ones.
only if unreviewed LLM code - as is becoming increasingly the standard - isn't introducing new RCEs constantly
No one with a shred of intellectual integrity uses a "There is a finite number" strawman.
As a matter of basic logic, there will never be a time when it will be known that there are no bugs.
We’ll have the same level of security as before; it’s just that, without LLM help, hackers won’t be as effective as before. So the bar is raised.