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> Pwno is a AI cybersecurity startup... We all know that LLMs were used to find these vulnerabilities, specifically on high impact projects. That's fine. Howe

by rvz 10mo ago

> Pwno is a AI cybersecurity startup... We all know that LLMs were used to find these vulnerabilities, specifically on high impact projects. That's fine. However, my only question is who actually provided the patch: The maintainers of FFmpeg? The LLM that is being used? Or the security researchers themselves after finding the issue? It seems that these two statements about the issue are in conflict: > We found and patched 6 memory vulnerabilities in FFmpeg in two days. > Dec, 2025: avcodec/exif maintainer provided patch.

9cb14c1ec0 10mo ago
> We all know that LLMs were used to find these vulnerabilities How do we know that? You seem quite certain.
- hedgehog 10mo ago
  They pitch their company as finding bugs "with AI". It's not hard to point one of the coding agents at a repo URL and have it find bugs even in code that's been in the wild for a long time, looking at their list that looks likely to be what they're doing.
  - bgwalter 10mo ago
    The list is pretty short though for 8 months. ossfuzz has found a lot more even with the fuzzers often not covering a lot of the code base. Manually paying people to write fuzzers by hand would yield a lot more and be less expensive than data centers and burning money, but who wants to pay people in 2026?
    - hedgehog 10mo ago
      I can't speak to what exactly this team is doing but I haven't seen any evidence that with-robot finds less bugs than without-robot. I do have some experience in this area.
    - tptacek 10mo ago
      Bugs are not equivalently findable and different techniques surface different bugs. The direct comparison you're trying to draw here doesn't hold.
      - bgwalter 10mo ago
        It does not matter what purported categories buffer overflows are in when manual fuzzing finds 100 and "AI" finds 5. If Google gave open source projects $100,000 per year for a competent QA person, it would cost less than this "AI" money straw fire and produce better results. Maybe the QA person would also find the 5 "AI" detected bugs.
        tptacek 10mo ago
        This would make sense if every memory corruption vulnerability was equivalently exploitable, which is of course not true. I think you'll find Google does in fact fuzz ffmpeg, though.
        bgwalter 10mo ago
        Google gives a pittance even for full ossfuzz integration. Which is why many projects just have the bare minimum fuzz tests. My original point was that even with these bare minimum tests ossfuzz has found way more than "AI" has.
        tptacek 10mo ago
        Another weird assumption you've got here is that fuzzing outcomes scale linearly with funding, which, no. Further, the field of factory-scale fuzzing and triage is one Google security engineers basically invented, so it's especially odd to hold Google out as a bad actor here. At any rate, Google didn't employ "AI" to find this vulnerability, and Google fuzzing probably wouldn't have outcompeted these researchers for this particular bug (totally different methods of bugfinding), so it's really hard to find a coherent point you'd be making about "fuzzers", "AI", and "Google" here.
tredre3 10mo ago
PWNO provided a patch but it was rejected for being too large[1]. A maintainer fixed it himself[2]. I don't know if PWNO used a LLM but it seems clear that the maintainer had a preferred specific style in mind so it was likely hand written (albeit inspired by the initial patch). 1. https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/pulls/21258 https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/pulls/21258 2. https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/commit/4bfac71ecd96488dd2dcd5649e08edb039a17a8b https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/commit/4bfac71ecd96488...
- j1elo 10mo ago
  I just need to say that "commits" has been translated to Spanish as "confirmations" in that website, and it made me chuckle. Is Forgejo using LLM-assisted translations? Or simply somepne without any context whatsoever in order to understand the word's meaning? ---- EDIT: I went on a fun detour to inform myself better, and ended up finding [1] where Gitlab had the same discussion. Seems some translations have tried to use "confirmation" as translation for a git commit. But really, this is one of those cases where no local word is able to appropriately describe such an unique concept oridea. I'd love to retroactively chime in and confirm (hah) that the english word "Commit" has trascended any translation attempts, and absolutely nobody would know what you're talking about if you say "confirmation" in an attempt to use a spanish term. So Forgejo authors if you read this: it'd better to do as Gitlab did. [1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/215956 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/215956

by rvz 10mo ago

9cb14c1ec0 10mo ago

> We all know that LLMs were used to find these vulnerabilities How do we know that? You seem quite certain.

hedgehog 10mo ago
They pitch their company as finding bugs "with AI". It's not hard to point one of the coding agents at a repo URL and have it find bugs even in code that's been in the wild for a long time, looking at their list that looks likely to be what they're doing.
- bgwalter 10mo ago
  The list is pretty short though for 8 months. ossfuzz has found a lot more even with the fuzzers often not covering a lot of the code base. Manually paying people to write fuzzers by hand would yield a lot more and be less expensive than data centers and burning money, but who wants to pay people in 2026?
  - hedgehog 10mo ago
    I can't speak to what exactly this team is doing but I haven't seen any evidence that with-robot finds less bugs than without-robot. I do have some experience in this area.
  - tptacek 10mo ago
    Bugs are not equivalently findable and different techniques surface different bugs. The direct comparison you're trying to draw here doesn't hold.
    - bgwalter 10mo ago
      It does not matter what purported categories buffer overflows are in when manual fuzzing finds 100 and "AI" finds 5. If Google gave open source projects $100,000 per year for a competent QA person, it would cost less than this "AI" money straw fire and produce better results. Maybe the QA person would also find the 5 "AI" detected bugs.
      - tptacek 10mo ago
        This would make sense if every memory corruption vulnerability was equivalently exploitable, which is of course not true. I think you'll find Google does in fact fuzz ffmpeg, though.
        bgwalter 10mo ago
        Google gives a pittance even for full ossfuzz integration. Which is why many projects just have the bare minimum fuzz tests. My original point was that even with these bare minimum tests ossfuzz has found way more than "AI" has.
        tptacek 10mo ago
        Another weird assumption you've got here is that fuzzing outcomes scale linearly with funding, which, no. Further, the field of factory-scale fuzzing and triage is one Google security engineers basically invented, so it's especially odd to hold Google out as a bad actor here. At any rate, Google didn't employ "AI" to find this vulnerability, and Google fuzzing probably wouldn't have outcompeted these researchers for this particular bug (totally different methods of bugfinding), so it's really hard to find a coherent point you'd be making about "fuzzers", "AI", and "Google" here.

tredre3 10mo ago

PWNO provided a patch but it was rejected for being too large[1]. A maintainer fixed it himself[2]. I don't know if PWNO used a LLM but it seems clear that the maintainer had a preferred specific style in mind so it was likely hand written (albeit inspired by the initial patch). 1. https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/pulls/21258 https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/pulls/21258 2. https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/commit/4bfac71ecd96488dd2dcd5649e08edb039a17a8b https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/commit/4bfac71ecd96488...

j1elo 10mo ago
I just need to say that "commits" has been translated to Spanish as "confirmations" in that website, and it made me chuckle. Is Forgejo using LLM-assisted translations? Or simply somepne without any context whatsoever in order to understand the word's meaning? ---- EDIT: I went on a fun detour to inform myself better, and ended up finding [1] where Gitlab had the same discussion. Seems some translations have tried to use "confirmation" as translation for a git commit. But really, this is one of those cases where no local word is able to appropriately describe such an unique concept oridea. I'd love to retroactively chime in and confirm (hah) that the english word "Commit" has trascended any translation attempts, and absolutely nobody would know what you're talking about if you say "confirmation" in an attempt to use a spanish term. So Forgejo authors if you read this: it'd better to do as Gitlab did. [1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/215956 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/215956