• hard_zero1@discuss.tchncs.de
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    11 hours ago

    In the article it says the ffmpeg vulns were found by an “autonomous” agent and that it produced a proof-of-concept for each. So what do you base your claims on? They seem quite contrary to that.

    Even if there was still a lot of human work involved, it seems that the LLM-Agents can help a lot with security research, as the number of (real) zero-days that are beeing found recently (with the help of AI) seems to spike (telling from what I read, e.g. here on Lemmy, or the number of security updates for my distro).

    • richmondez@lemdro.id
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      9 hours ago

      It’s states they were produced which I’m taking to mean found and it’s ambigously worded so it’s unclear if the article is actually claiming it generated PoC for all of them. It doesn’t say how many if any hallucinated results were produced or how much effort was needed to fully confirm, basically down played the human involvement.

      It’s great that so many bugs are being found and squashed but it’s implied LLMs are doing all the work when what they are actually doing is assisting as a tool.

      • hard_zero1@discuss.tchncs.de
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        8 hours ago

        I agree that the wording is a bit ambiguous, I interpreted it the way it seems more natural to me. In the post by the researcher(s) themselves, it says in the tldr paragraph that the “agent produces concrete, reproducible PoC inputs to confirm its findings” but also that they (probably humans) “explored the exploitability of the issues and developed a PoC demonstrating a RCE exploit primitive”. Apparently it finds the vulnerabilities very concretely but humans were involved for the full-blown exploit. It also doesn’t say much about the number of false-positives.

        I’m not in the business, so I can’t tell how much of the work such agents are actually saving. Since the articles don’t say much about the amount of human involvement, the imagination conveyed by them probably depends strongly on the (knowledge of the) reader. But in my opinion it is a bit of stretch to say this is downplaying it. It should be noted though, that the article probably sources its information from a post by the company selling that AI.

        With that information, the “without any confidence” and “area of interest” parts of your previous post still seem misleading.