Comment by Fordec
7 hours ago
I fully believe the only sustainable future is that hot patching will need to itself become fully automated. Hot patch now with a minimal allowed amount of line changes to head off the AIs, review it in office hours for auditing and the team is actually awake.
My second belief is that environment variables as a development concept will need to be retired. If it's something that causes a security breach if it by its mere existence on a public git repo, it is information that by design cannot ever pass to a filesystem out of a chain of trust, not by mere development conventions people choose to adhere to.
> hot patching will need to itself become fully automated.
Great, even less control over the things we use and more power ceded to corporations.
Due to the small nature of hot patching (eg. bump this dependency, rotate these keys, turn off that config, follow the runbook) it will unlikely need to be a frontier model and is likely able to be done LocalLLM/Jev style decision making rather than having to hand all the keys to frontier model operators.
One more step to just turning it all over to Skynet. It's hilarious how prophetic that movie was.
Do you want your shit hacked? Better patch.
Hot patching is itself a liability
Not reacting is a liability. Blue-Green deployment is a liability. Code is itself a liability. Choosing this career at all is a liability.
For the record, there was a bunch of non-functional vibe coded fixes flying around during this PHP bug. If you were just running the first thing AI made because you were worried about "not reacting," you would likely end up running a crap script.
AI is quite good at finding vulnerabilities, but it's been rough for patching them. The old adage "defenders have to be right every time, attackers only have to be right once" applies to AI security patches.
Great, but the fact remains that easy hot patching which skips normal review is going to open you up to many of the same liabilities you're trying to minimize by introducing it. The target just shifts, and people will attack that infrastructure.
The actual solution largely involves the same technologies but in reverse: leveraging AI for live security monitoring, better correctness validation and security testing before code goes live, etc. And of course more pressure to use battle-tested widely-adopted libraries and systems, even though of course that comes with its own tradeoffs.
Importantly, as an engineer, when someone tells you something has liabilities or tradeoffs, the response is not "Everything is a liability, existing is a liability"; that is unprofessional. The appropriate response is to engage with them on these tradeoffs and working through the best ones, because that's your job. Otherwise defer to security engineers who are ready to back up their arguments. It could be as simple as following up with, "But do you think those liabilities outweigh the benefits of hot patching without proper review? What are some of the main liabilities you see, and what methods/technologies do you think properly address them?"
1 reply →