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Speedrunners are vulnerability researchers, they just don't know it yet
- klysm 2y agoThis is an interesting premise. I especially like framing speed runners as researchers
- echelon 2y agoIt's a super interesting premise, and I like it too. We should distinguish those in the community that actually discover new glitches from those who simply practice what others have uncovered, though. Those aren't always the same person.
- chc4 2y agoYeah, there's definitely shades. I think for most games the people who find glitches and drive forward this kind of research usually aren't actually that good of runners themselves. But for TAS runs, where there isn't as much of human skill component and technical execution is more important, they're usually closer aligned. And in any case the speedrunners and glitch discovery people are all in the same discords together talking about the game.
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoI remember watching a video about this a while ago....it was a fresh perspective into a side of security research I didn't consider.
- MrCheeze 2y agoAre you thinking of Bismuth's "Speedrunning as a gateway to scientific endeavours", perhaps? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8_1lQ2KH50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8_1lQ2KH50
- Almondsetat 2y agosome speedrunners that compete in categories where glitches are allowed and who find the bugs themselves can be labeled hackers.
- ismailmaj 2y agoIt's fairly rare to see people consistently find glitches across games, only distorsion2 comes to mind.
- casey2 2y agoNope. I completely disagree. Unless you are using tools and rigorous methods you are just playing around. Just because most games are all broken in easily predictable ways doesn't mean every new game creates a hacker. It's more correct to say "speedrunners show that almost all game developers are bad at software engineering". sometimes good at creating fun games, but quick to say "you are holding it wrong" when you breath on the thing and it blows up.
- scott_w 2y agoI think it’s a harsh interpretation to say they’re bad because a determined hacker can break their game. Games aren’t security critical software, so they’re not going to get the level of investment needed to prevent this kind of thing that, in practice, hurts nobody. That’s to say nothing of exploits that can only be used by TAS software. That’s like saying my car is a piece of shit because it’ll not survive being driven into a volcano.
- Almondsetat 2y agoHacking is playing around, that's what hackers will tell you. You are conflating hacking with penetration testing or "formal" disciplines like that
- sumeno 2y agoEven ignoring this weird definition of a "hacker", you've shown how little you know about how many exploits in games are found. They often involve stepping through the assembly of the game to understand how a glitch works and how to use it in a useful way. Not just "screw around in a game until you suddenly discover a useful trick"
- tptacek 2y agoThis is absolutely and obviously true. Vulnerability researchers watch tool-assisted speedrun videos with jealousy. Side-note: when we did Microcorruption, game devs outperformed everybody but elite vuln researchers.
- chc4 2y agoMicrocorruption is basically just a Zachtronics game, if you squint, which I always thought was a fun framing. Reading the blog posts about Starfighter/Stockfighter definitely made me think of video game style exploits, too, if not the same type of glitches. Video game players love to find ways to sell items to NPCs and then buy them back at a lower price for infinite money...
- nonrandomstring 2y agoNo doubt about this. Game-devs, modders, map-maker/hackers get hands on such a breadth of skills (graphics, sound, scripts, network) inside a contested environment that means a lot to them they naturally feel at home in cybersec.
- Graziano_M 2y agoI got more satisfaction out of solving the last level of micro corruption than I probably have from beating any game.
- tptacek 2y agoThat rules. That last level was Nick Carlini and Hans Nielsen, both of whom have done awesome things since then; we just interviewed Nicholas on cryptanalytic attacks against LLMs: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2025/01/28/cryptanalyzing-llms-with-nicholas-carlini/ https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2025/01/28/cryptana...
- Graziano_M 2y agoWill give it a listen! And for posterity, I wrote up my solution: https://grazfather.github.io/posts/2018-11-24-microcorruption-hollywood/ https://grazfather.github.io/posts/2018-11-24-microcorruptio...
- joshdavham 2y agoInteresting article! Though it's too bad that cyber security is not as intrinsically fun and interesting to a lot of speed runners as video games. A large part of what allows speedrunners to spend hours searching for glitches and exploits in these games is that they're having an absolute blast while doing it! Also exploiting glitches in decades old games is generally pretty accessible and doesn't have a high barrier to entry like cyber security.
- egypturnash 2y agoOpens with an AI-generated image, I'm gonna assume the text is from the same source and close the tab.
- prophesi 2y agoI think if they're active in the speedrunning community, then they're already well aware of this! And for a fun additional example to add to this article, you can often find TAS'ers talking about arbitrary code execution. The legendary GDQ run of TASBot's alternate ending to OoT[0] utiziling an ACE exploit they found in that game absolutely blew me away. [0] https://youtu.be/PNbkv_DJ0f0?t=3112 https://youtu.be/PNbkv_DJ0f0?t=3112
- chamomeal 2y agoI forgot the details, but I think I saw a YouTube upload of a streamer who wrote flappy bird into super Mario by like… jumping at apples at specific times. Or some weird thing like that lol. I’ll try to find it later on my computer
- janetmissed 2y agohttps://youtu.be/hB6eY73sLV0?si=pF-etE5W-xZhoVBf https://youtu.be/hB6eY73sLV0?si=pF-etE5W-xZhoVBf here is the link for anyone curious
- Cockbrand 2y agoJust when I thought I’d seen it all... Thank you for sharing this!
- Dwedit 2y agoThat would be SethBling who performed that.
- GuB-42 2y agoShells, not apples. Making it an actual shellcode!
- thatswrong0 2y agoI love Ocarina of Time speedruns. The sheer level of love that went into that specific run was sooooo beautiful, and like the fact they made it internet live.. via an N64...? I want to shout out ZFG if ppl arent aware cause he has IMO done the most technically impressive real time speedrun of any game - specifically the 100% SRM run he did is inscrutably insane. But it wasn't just about him - it was an effort by so many people. The number of glitches and exploits that have been found by the community, as well as the NP hard routing and tools created for finding angle perfect setups by various people.. It's straight up community driven exploit art. And it's like yeah, the fastest way to beat the game is to practically manually manipulate memory to redirect specific function calls to give you stuff you need and float around and purposely void out facing exactly a 1/65536 perfect angle setup a hundred separate times to randomly jump around to various rooms in the game?? Wowwwww And the community around it is so wholesome. The sheer amount of collective curiosity, ingenuity, and effort to dismantle and exploit a 20+ year old game for no other purpose than going fast.. idk. Love it. Here's a commentated tool assisted human-like run (but not live): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8EE9FXeJnE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8EE9FXeJnE And the actual run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sdxdwnpi-wU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sdxdwnpi-wU
- pdpi 2y agoAt its most extreme, this crossover gets you things like arbitrary code execution on Super Mario World. EDIT: There was supposed to be a link here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnZ2NNYySuE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnZ2NNYySuE
- GrantMoyer 2y agoI also think a lot of speedrunnimg tecniques demontrate the "anything can happen" nature of undefined behavior in an viscerally, not-purely-theoretical way. What happens when you don't take undefined behavior seriously? Well, then Mario can backward longjump into a parallel universe and teleport enemies on a whim.
- tennisflyi 2y agoMaybe QA as well
- turtleyacht 2y agoYes, exactly. Detail-oriented, fault-finding domain experts. Bridge the idea that functional testing, perf testing, and the like are certain aspects of security. (Stealth) training folks to cultivate a hacking mindset.
- cushychicken 2y agoWorked with the folks at Zetier previously. They’re bright. Go work with them if you want to do some cool VR stuff.
- andrewmcwatters 2y agoAnd some vulnerability researchers are just prosecution speedrunners!
- davedx 2y agoI watched the world record speedrun of Subnautica the other day and someone was kind enough to have posted a comment with a full list of all the bugs he exploited to beat the game in 28 minutes. It was quite mind boggling. When I played the game I barely encountered a single bug or glitch - it seemed pretty polished! - but in actual fact there were 100’s of outstanding bugs, years after the game’s release and multiple updates.
- rat87 2y agoIt's doubtful that there is one piece of software that does anything non trivial that has bugs, even short command line programs. The best we can hope for is that bugs don't seem to cause too many problems.
- eru 2y ago> It's doubtful that there is one piece of software that does anything non trivial that has bugs, even short command line programs. TeX and Metafont and other Knuth programs come pretty close. There's also programs that have been proven correct. (And the proof systems themselves are usually fairly small and can have multiple independent implementations. Or at least the core of these systems that everything hinges on.)
- oasisaimlessly 2y agoI assume this is the speedrun you're talking about: https://www.speedrun.com/subnautica/runs/ylp925xm https://www.speedrun.com/subnautica/runs/ylp925xm If you look in the top-right corner at 0:19, the build being played is "Sep-2018 61056", strange for a Dec 2024 speedrun. Presumably that specific old version was used because the glitches it relies on have been fixed in current versions.
- chc4 2y agoA lot of speedruns will not only use specific versions of online patchable games, but old games will have players use specifically Japanese or European physical copies for the same reason: there are glitches that are only present on the Japanese version of Pokemon Red/Blue that were fixed for the NA release, for example. Some of the time it gets really weird, like people specifically using the Wii Virtual Console re-release of a game in order to take advantage of its emulator being different from physical hardware - which is (usually) allowed, because it's still an "official release".
- minimaxir 2y agoThe metaphor is a bit stretched for the purposes of content marketing a startup. The major difference between vulnerability researchers and the speedrunning community is that speedrunning is highly collaborative and open. There are massive speedrunning Discord communities for each game, and even before Discord existed, tricks and hacks were discovered iteratively just by many people watching other people do them often unintentionally and trying to figure out how they work (a common trend in every Summoning Salt video). Nintendo doesn't care if people find ACE in decade-old games (usually) and post decompiled versions of games on GitHub so people can find out how they tick, but vulnerability researchers can't do that unless they want to risk causing a legal shitstorm.
- qwery 2y agoYes, the differences are substantial. It's also worth noting that although some speedrunning may be akin to vulnerability research, the vast majority of speedrunners are "only" practicing and replicating exploits demonstrated by others. They're in different columns.
- rfoo 2y ago> the vast majority of speedrunners are "only" practicing and replicating exploits demonstrated by others So they are red teamers :p
- tbalsam 2y agoI'm a speedrunner, and I'm pretty sure this is well known -- and accepted as standard in some categories! It's a pretty well accepted standard (to the point of the headline being almost a mild offense!). In the gaming world, undefined software behavior is critical to this sort of thing, we see this especially in some games like the legendary exploits found in the Ocarina of Time speedruns for example. I mean, in Super Mario World, SethBling did code injection to manually run a version of Flappy Bird (how ironic given the origin of the pipes!) in the game. By hand. No savestates. It took forever and the run through is really and truly fascinating: https://youtu.be/hB6eY73sLV0?si=nIP07o_fa6O9rauW https://youtu.be/hB6eY73sLV0?si=nIP07o_fa6O9rauW I speedrun things other than games as well -- and so the generalization is not just that we are security researchers, we are people who fundamentally learn the "shape" of a thing very, very well, and ways that this shape can be used to get from one state on that shape to another. In conclusion -- yes, it can be something as simple as security research! But the joy and the beauty of speedrunning is something so much bigger and beautiful than that -- though it certainly is one outcome that can be had!
- MrCheeze 2y agoI've wondered myself why there's so little overlap between these two closely related interests of mine. Some of it seems to be the "But I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs." effect, where some of the people working on exploiting games ONLY care about what can be done in their one game of interest - it doesn't always generalize to interest in using the same techniques against everything else. Of course there's also the fact that exploiting 20-30 year old games is just vastly easier than modern software, due to the total lack of mitigations in them. And that's on top of the fact that with popular games, you're building on decades of reverse engineering work rather than (potentially) starting from scratch. And the arguably superior toolset (savestates etc). But I think a very big factor is the one this blogpost is trying to address - most people just don't know anything at all about the vuln research industry, which is not exactly searching for attention in the ways that speedruns broadcast to hundreds of thousands of viewers for charity are.
- minimaxir 2y agoFor HN reference, MrCheeze is well known and has done quite a lot of work over the years glitch-hunting in older games. (and is cited in the SethBling video posted several times in this thread)
- orbital-decay 2y agoBecause actual gaming vulnerability researchers that do know who they are are called cheaters and are mostly active in cutthroat PvP games, not single player ones. Just ask the developers of Rust (the game, not the language), they know everything about it. They were one of the very few devs to ask the community to do what all communities in such games always do anyway - find exploits and glitches, and publish them on Youtube. As a result, they ended up with a game that is pretty robust to item duplication and general exploits.
- julianeon 2y agoActually this implies there's probably an opening in YouTube for someone to make vulnerability videos in the style of speed run videos. And then poaching some of that audience, and riding the sponsorship opportunities. Not my skillset but yeah, I could definitely see that working.
- TZubiri 2y agoAlso competitive gamers and pannenkoek, which I can't fit into any category. But the man found all of the bugs in super mario 64 and then some.
- gunian 2y agowhat about the road runner?
- appleaday1 2y agoLOL another business exec or MBA bro trying to flood the cybersecurity market, you guys are seriously reaching here.
- stuaxo 2y agoFor every fun thing there is a boring version someone will pay you for that has none of the real reasons or joy in it.
- oinkbutton 2y ago[dead]
- pizza234 2y agoThe article describes very strong similarities, definitely more that between a taxi and F1 drivers; read the sections "Glitch hunting is reverse engineering" and "…And it’s vulnerability research".
- NobodyNada 2y agoIn some cases, it is exactly the same thing. I co-authored the current fastest TAS of Super Metroid (video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=m-Gt57ur7OA https://youtube.com/watch?v=m-Gt57ur7OA, writeup: https://tasvideos.org/8214S https://tasvideos.org/8214S). Our run involves exploiting a race condition in the game's sprite animation system, which under the right set of circumstances can cause the game to try to execute code from unmapped memory. We manipulate the behavior of enemies in the room to precisely control the timing of the exploit such that some hardware DMA fetches happen at the same time as the reads from the unmapped memory, which influences the results of the reads through bus capacitance & gives us enough control to redirect the program counter to the controller input registers, at which point we have full arbitrary code execution. That's not even "overlapping", that straight up is vulnerability research & building an exploit chain. Granted, that's the extreme end -- most speedruns don't go anywhere near that deep into the weeds. But every sufficiently well established speedrun community has people who specialize in reverse-engineering, understanding the game mechanics, and figuring out exploits. Most of my day-to-day participation in the Super Metroid community isn't working on methods of full-on arbitrary code execution; but I do spend a lot of time doing things like looking at boss AI, investigating inconsistent speedrun strats to find out how to normalize them, writing tooling to help people practice, figuring on how to reproduce a weird glitch someone encountered, etc.
- bitbasher 2y agoMany moons ago I used to speedrun Goldeneye and Perfect Dark on the n64. This was in the very early 2000s. I was pretty good but by no means the best. It's strange to see many of the people I used to hang out with on AIM and MSN messenger now have legendary speed runs and entire lore threads and wikipedia pages written about them. I think the itch you scratch doing speedruns is a lot like the itch you scratch doing any kind of creative coding and/or exploit research.
- terpimost 2y agoAntithesis is using this idea to improve its bug-finding product: https://antithesis.com/blog/zelda/ https://antithesis.com/blog/zelda/
- roland35 2y agoThe only speedrun I can personally do is the Warios Stadium N64 Mario kart level where you can hop over the wall right at the start! My favorite from Baldurs Gate 3 is where a speedrunner found that if you kill Shadowheart and stuff her in a box, you can quickly get through the story. Sucks for her!
- grandempire 2y agoSpeedrunners have an emotional attachment to video games from childhood. It’s why the most competitive categories are classic games like Mario. They take something you and I are familiar with and play it to such a degree it becomes a new experience. You can’t look at the meta skills around speedrunning and expect them to transfer with a similar drive or interest. What it probably indicates is that a large number of talented youth never had an outlet for their skills which rewarded them. So their most meaningful experiences became video games instead of say, electrical engineering or teaching math.
- cytocync 2y ago[dead]
- ltbarcly3 2y agoI mean this is pretty obvious, they are both trying to glitch software to get a desired but unintended outcome. I think if anything vulnerability 'researchers' should study speedrunners more than the opposite. They are shockingly successful and they have shown again and again that there is almost no limit to how much you can glitch software.
- pinoy420 2y ago[dead]
- eat 2y agoThe important distinction, and where the comparison might fall short as the job-advertisement purpose of this post, is motivation. Speedrunners enjoy games because games are fun. Speedrunners get to actually use these vulnerabilities in a way that is meaningful in their lives, whereas vulnerability researchers typically don't. This is an observation about cyber security in general, but in my experience, bug hunting and reverse engineering require a lot of tenacity at a level that writing software and other areas of IT do not. I think tenacity is a difficult thing to summon if your only tangible motivation is a salary, the target software is intrinsically boring, and you know that you'll be rewarded whether or not you find the bugs.
- candlemas 2y agoThey're game testers.
- nicebyte 2y agoincluding ai generated illustrations in your articles or presentations is very cringe
- Kwpolska 2y agoThis blogspam is attributed to "a Senior Cyber Engineer". Are they (a) ashamed of the nonsense advertisement they wrote, or (b) not actually an engineer, but rather a ChatGPT prompter?
- octacat 2y agothey pretty much know it. Also, many speedrunners just run, while research is done and "published" by people before, pretty much using all the hacking technics.