10 ms·
The coming industrialisation of exploit generation with LLMs
- baxtr 9mo ago> We should start assuming that in the near future the limiting factor on a state or group’s ability to develop exploits, break into networks, escalate privileges and remain in those networks, is going to be their token throughput over time, and not the number of hackers they employ. Scary.
- nottorp 9mo agoHeh. What is probably really happening is that those states or groups are having their "hackers" analyze common mistakes in vibe coded LLM output and writing by hand generic exploits for that...
- protocolture 9mo agoI genuinely dont know who to believe. The people who claim LLMs are writing excellent exploits. Or the people who claim that LLMs are sending useless bug reports. I dont feel like both can really be true.
- simonw 9mo agoWhy can't they both be true? The quality of output you see from any LLM system is filtered through the human who acts on those results. A dumbass pasting LLM generated "reports" into an issue system doesn't disprove the efforts of a subject-matter expert who knows how to get good results from LLMs and has the necessary taste to only share the credible issues it helps them find.
- anonymous908213 9mo agoThey can't both be true if we're talking about the premise of the article, which is the subject of the headline and expounded upon prominently in the body: The Industrialisation of Intrusion By ‘industrialisation’ I mean that the ability of an organisation to complete a task will be limited by the number of tokens they can throw at that task. In order for a task to be ‘industrialised’ in this way it needs two things: An LLM-based agent must be able to search the solution space. It must have an environment in which to operate, appropriate tools, and not require human assistance. The ability to do true ‘search’, and cover more of the solution space as more tokens are spent also requires some baseline capability from the model to process information, react to it, and make sensible decisions that move the search forward. It looks like Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 possess this in my experiments. It will be interesting to see how they do against a much larger space, like v8 or Firefox. The agent must have some way to verify its solution. The verifier needs to be accurate, fast and again not involve a human. "The results are contigent upon the human" and "this does the thing without a human involved" are incompatible. Given what we've seen from incompetent humans using the tools to spam bug bounty programs with absolute garbage, it seems the premise of the article is clearly factually incorrect. They cite their own experiment as evidence for not needing human expertise, but it is likely that their expertise was in fact involved in designing the experiment[1]. They also cite OpenAI's own claims as their other piece of evidence for this theory, which is worth about as much as a scrap of toilet paper given the extremely strong economic incentives OpenAI has to exaggerate the capabilities of their software. [1] If their experiment even demonstrates what it purports to demonstrate. For anyone to give this article any credence, the exploit really needs to be independently verified that it is what they say it is and that it was achieved the way they say it was achieved.
- GaggiX 9mo agoAfter setting the environment and the verifier you can spawn as many agents as you want until the conditions are met, this is only possible because they run without human assistance, that's the "industrialisation".
- simonw 9mo agoMy expectation is that any organization that attempts this will need subject matter experts to both setup and run the swarm of exploit finding agents for them.
- IanCal 9mo agoA few points: 1. I think you have mixed up assistance and expertise. They talk about not needing a human in the loop for verification and to continue search but not about initial starts. Those are quite different. One well specified task can be attempted many times, and the skill sets are overlapping but not identical. 2. The article is about where they may get to rather than just what they are capable of now. 3. There’s no conflict between the idea that 10 parallel agents of the top models can mostly have one that successfully exploits a vulnerability - gated on an actual test that the exploit works - with feedback and iteration BUT random models pointed at arbitrary code without a good spec and without the ability to run code, and just run once, will generate lower quality results.
- adw 9mo agoWhat this is saying is "you need an objective criterion you can use as a success metric" (aka a verifiable reward in RL terms). "Design of verifiers" is a specific form of domain expertise. This applies to exploits, but it applies _extremely_ generally. The increased interest in TLA+, Lean, etc comes from the same place; these are languages which are well suited to expressing deterministic success criteria, and it appears that (for a very wide range of problems across the whole of software) given a clear enough, verifiable enough objective, you can point the money cannon at it until the problem is solved. The economic consequences of that are going to be very interesting indeed.
- protocolture 9mo agoTheres no filtering mentioned in the OP article. It claims GPT only created working useful exploits. If it can do that, it could also submit those exploits as perfectly as bug reports?
- simonw 9mo agoThe OP is the filtering expert.
- moyix 9mo agoThere is filtering mentioned, it's just not done by a human: > I have written up the verification process I used for the experiments here, but the summary is: an exploit tends to involve building a capability to allow you to do something you shouldn’t be able to do. If, after running the exploit, you can do that thing, then you’ve won. For example, some of the experiments involved writing an exploit to spawn a shell from the Javascript process. To verify this the verification harness starts a listener on a particular local port, runs the Javascript interpreter and then pipes a command into it to run a command line utility that connects to that local port. As the Javascript interpreter has no ability to do any sort of network connections, or spawning of another process in normal execution, you know that if you receive the connect back then the exploit works as the shell that it started has run the command line utility you sent to it. It is more work to build such "perfect" verifiers, and they don't apply to every vulnerability type (how do you write a Python script to detect a logic bug in an arbitrary application?), but for bugs like these where the exploit goal is very clear (exec code or write arbitrary content to a file) they work extremely well.
- doomerhunter 9mo agoBoth are true, the difference is the skill level of the people who use / create programs to coordinate LLMs to generate those reports. The AI slop you see on curl's bug bounty program[1] (mostly) comes from people who are not hackers in the first place. In the contrary persons like the author are obviously skilled in security research and will definitely send valid bugs. Same can be said for people in my space who do build LLM-driven exploit development. In the US Xbow hired quite some skilled researchers [2] had some promising development for instance. [1] https://hackerone.com/curl/hacktivity https://hackerone.com/curl/hacktivity [2] https://xbow.com/about https://xbow.com/about
- ronsor 9mo agoLLMs are both extremely useful to competent developers and extremely harmful to those who aren't.
- rvz 9mo agoAccurate.
- tptacek 9mo agoIf it helps, I read this (before it landed here) because Halvar Flake told everyone on Twitter to read it.
- simonw 9mo agoI hadn't heard of Halvar Flake but evidently he's a well respected figure in security - https://ringzer0.training/advisory-board-thomas-dullien-halvar-flake/ https://ringzer0.training/advisory-board-thomas-dullien-halv... mentions "After working at Google Project Zero, he cofounded startup optimyze, which was acquired by Elastic Security in 2021" His co-founder on optimyze was Sean Heelan, the author of the OP.
- tptacek 9mo agoYes, Halvar Flake is pretty well respected in exploit dev circles.
- 0xbadcafebee 9mo agoSure he can write exploits, but can he cool a beer really fast?
- rwmj 9mo agoWith the exploits, you can try them and they either work or they don't. An attacker is not especially interested in analysing why the successful ones work. With the CVE reports some poor maintainer has to go through and triage them, which is far more work, and very asymmetrical because the reporters can generate their spam reports in volume while each one requires detailed analysis.
- SchemaLoad 9mo agoThere's been several notable posts where maintainers found there was no bug at all, or the example code did not even call code from their project and had just found running a python script can do things on your computer. Entirely AI generated Issue reports and examples wasting maintainer time.
- simonw 9mo agoMy hunch is that the dumbasses submitting those reports were't actually using coding agent harnesses at all - they were pasting blocks of code into ChatGPT or other non-agent-harness tools and asking for vulnerabilities and reporting what came back. An "agent harness" here is software that directly writes and executes code to test that it works. A vulnerability reported by such an agent harness with included proof-of-concept code that has been demonstrated to work is a different thing from an "exploit" that was reported by having a long context model spit out a bunch of random ideas based purely on reading the code. I'm confident you can still find dumbasses who can mess up at using coding agent harnesses and create invalid, time wasting bug reports. Dumbasses are gonna dumbass.
- staticassertion 9mo agoI strongly suspect the same thing - that they weren't using agents at all in the reports we've seen, let alone agents with instructions on how to verify a viable attack, a threat model, etc.
- wat10000 9mo agoI've had multiple reports with elaborate proofs of concept that boil down to things like calling dlopen() on a path to a malicious library and saying dlopen has a security vulnerability.
- QuadmasterXLII 9mo agoThese exploits were costing $50 of API credit each. If you receive 5001 issues from $100 in API spend on bug hunting and one of the issues cost $50 and the other 5000 cost one cent each, and they’re all visually indistinguishable using perfect grammar and familiar cyber security lingo; hard to find the dianond.
- tptacek 9mo agoThe point of the post is that the harness generates a POC. It either works or it doesn't.
- QuadmasterXLII 9mo agohttps://hackerone.com/reports/3100073 https://hackerone.com/reports/3100073 includes a POC too- still slop
- pjc50 9mo agoOnce your exploit machine is good enough, you can start using stolen credentials to mine more exploits. This is going to be the new version of malware installing bitcoin miners.
- AdieuToLogic 9mo agoBoth can be true if each group selectively provides LLM output supporting their position. Essentially, this situation can be thought of as a form of the Infinite Monkey Theorem[0] where the result space is drastically reduced from "purely random" to "likely to be statistically relevant." For an interesting overview of the above theorem, see here[1]. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem 1 - https://www.yalescientific.org/2025/04/sorry-shakespeare-why-monkeys-wont-write-hamlet/ https://www.yalescientific.org/2025/04/sorry-shakespeare-why...
- wat10000 9mo agoLLMs produce good output and bad output. The trick is figuring out which is which. They excel at tasks where good output is easily distinguished. For example, I've had a lot of success with making small reproducers for bugs. I see weird behavior A coming from giant pile of code B, figure out how to trigger A in a small example. It can often do so, and when it gets it wrong it's easy to detect because its example doesn't actually do A. The people sending useless bug reports aren't checking for good output.
- octoberfranklin 9mo agoFinished exploits (for immediate deployment) don't have to be maintainable, and they only need to work once.
- GoatInGrey 9mo agoBoth are true. Exploits are a very narrow problem with unambiguous success metrics. While also naturally complementing the ingrained persistence of LLMs. Bug reports are much more fuzzy by comparison with open-ended goals that lead to the LLMs metaphorically cheating on their homework to satisfy the prompter who doesn't know any better.
- raesene9 9mo agoYeah they definitely can be true (IME), as there's a massive difference depending on how LLMs are used to the quality of the output. For example if you just ask an LLM in a browser with no tool use to "find a vulnerability in this program", it'll likely give you something but it is very likely to be hallucinated or irrelevant. However if you use the same LLM model via an agent, and provide it with concrete guidance on how to test its success, and the environment needed to prove that success, you are much more likely to get a good result. It's like with Claude code, if you don't provide a test environment it will often make mistakes in the coding and tell you all is well, but if you provide a testing loop it'll iterate till it actually works.
- _factor 9mo agoDepends near entirely on the model being used. A bug report by Opus and a bug report from Gemma3 are not of the same caliber.
- er4hn 9mo agoI think the author makes some interesting points, but I'm not that worried about this. These tools feel symmetric for defenders to use as well. There's an easy to see path that involves running "LLM Red Teams" in CI before merging code or major releases. The fact that it's a somewhat time expensive (I'm ignoring cost here on purpose) test makes it feel similar to fuzzing for where it would fit in a pipeline. New tools, new threats, new solutions.
- hackyhacky 9mo ago> I think the author makes some interesting points, but I'm not that worried about this. Given the large number of unmaintained or non-recent software out there, I think being worried is the right approach. The only guaranteed winner is the LLM companies, who get to sell tokens to both sides.
- pixl97 9mo agoI mean you're leaving out large nation state entities
- SchemaLoad 9mo agoThis + the fact software and hardware has been getting structurally more secure over time. New changes like language safety features, Memory Integrity Enforcement, etc will significantly raise the bar on the difficulty to find exploits.
- amelius 9mo ago> These tools feel symmetric for defenders to use as well. Why? The attackers can run the defending software as well. As such they can test millions of testcases, and if one breaks through the defenses they can make it go live.
- execveat 9mo agoDefenders have threat modeling on their side. With access to source code and design docs, configs, infra, actual requirements and ability to redesign / choose the architecture and dependencies for the job, etc - there's a lot that actually gives defending side an advantage. I'm quite optimistic about AI ultimately making systems more secure and well protected, shifting the overall balance towards the defenders.
- simonw 9mo ago> In the hardest task I challenged GPT-5.2 it to figure out how to write a specified string to a specified path on disk, while the following protections were enabled: address space layout randomisation, non-executable memory, full RELRO, fine-grained CFI on the QuickJS binary, hardware-enforced shadow-stack, a seccomp sandbox to prevent shell execution, and a build of QuickJS where I had stripped all functionality in it for accessing the operating system and file system. To write a file you need to chain multiple function calls, but the shadow-stack prevents ROP and the sandbox prevents simply spawning a shell process to solve the problem. GPT-5.2 came up with a clever solution involving chaining 7 function calls through glibc’s exit handler mechanism. Yikes.
- rvz 9mo agoTells you all you need to know around how extremely weak a C executable like QuickJS is for LLMs to exploit. (If you as an infosec researcher prompt them correctly to find and exploit vulnerabilities). > Leak a libc Pointer via Use-After-Free. The exploit uses the vulnerability to leak a pointer to libc. I doubt Rust would save you here unless the binary has very limited calls to libc, but would be much harder for a UaF to happen in Rust code.
- cookiengineer 9mo agoThe reason I value Go so much is because you have a fat dependency free binary that's just a bunch of syscalls when you use CGO_ENABLED=0. Combine that with a minimal docker container and you don't even need a shell or anything but the kernel in those images.
- akoboldfrying 9mo agoWhy would statically linking a library reduce the number of vulnerabilities in it? AFAICT, static linking just means the set of vulnerabilities you get landed with won't change over time.
- cookiengineer 9mo ago
- GaggiX 9mo agoThe NSO Group going to spawn 10k Claude Code instances now.
- saagarjha 9mo agoNow?
- ytrt54e 9mo agoYour personal data will become more important as time goes by... And you will need to have less trust in having multiple accounts with sensitive data stored [online shopping etc] as they just become vectors to attack.
- ironbound 9mo agoreverse engineering code is still pretty average, I'm fare limited in attention and time but LLM are not pulling their weight in this area today, be it compounding errors or in context failures.
- _carbyau_ 9mo agoMy take away: apparently Cyberpunk Hackers of the dystopian future cruising through the virtual world will use GPT-5.2-or-greater as their "attack program" to break the "ICE" (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, not the currently politically charged term...). I still doubt they will hook up their brains though.
- dfajgljsldkjag 9mo agoI was under the impression that once you have a vulnerability with code execution, writing the actual payload to exploit it is the easy part. With tools like pentools and etc is fairly straightforward. The interesting part is still finding new potential RCE vulnerabilities, and generally if you can demonstrate the vulnerability even without demonstrating an E2E pwn red teams and white hats will still get credit.
- tptacek 9mo agoHe's not starting from a vulnerability offering code execution; it's a memory corruption vulnerability (it's effectively a heap write).
- frosting1337 9mo agoIt's as easy as drawing the rest of the owl, sure.
- pianopatrick 9mo agoI would not be shocked to learn that intelligence agencies are using AI tools to hack back into AI companies that make those tools to figure out how to create their own copycat AI.
- kiririn7 9mo agoi doubt they are competent enough to match what private companies are doing
- jjmarr 9mo agoI would be shocked if intelligence agencies, being government bodies, have anything better than GitHub Copilot.
- octoberfranklin 9mo agoThey had Google Earth long before Google did...
- socketcluster 9mo agoThe continuous lowering of entry barriers to software creation, combined with the continuous lowering of entry barriers to software hacking is an explosive combination. We need new platforms which provide the necessary security guardrails, verifiability, simplicity of development, succinctness of logic (high feature/code ratio)... You can't trust non-technical vibe coders with today's software tools when they can't even trust themselves.
- tosapple 9mo agoWhy did you edit out the third paragraph about finding a single exploit on target being slanted against having to secure a whole system?
- socketcluster 9mo agoWhat I said was true but after thinking about it a bit more, I wasn't sure how material it was to my argument after considering additional factors. There are other nuances which may offset the asymmetry a bit; for example the security analyst generally has much more visibility over the company's code than the hacker does. That said, I stand by my original point because I think that building secure systems is really hard; it's much more effort per unit of functionality to build the system correctly (and doing that for every part of it) than it is to crack it (by finding a single hole). On the side of defense, you need to understand a lot of nuance about how your system works and how parts interact to make it secure; any neglect can potentially be a critical vulnerability which can compromise the entire system. On the side of offense, sometimes mindless prodding can uncover a critical vulnerability. The intelligence/thinking requirement is lower; it's more about knowledge than thinking. For example, there are some special payloads which you can send which may pose a problem for different systems built by different companies because the companies share the same underlying engine or they fell victim to the same footgun. I think this aspect is much more important than my previous argument.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- nl 9mo agoOne of the interesting things to me about this is that Codex 5.2 found the most complex of the exploits. The reflects my experience too. Opus 4.5 is my everyday driver - I like using it. But Codex 5.2 with Extra High thinking is just a bit more powerful. Also despite what people say, I don't believe progress in LLM performance is slowing down at all - instead we are having more trouble generating tasks that are hard enough, and the frontier tasks they are failing at or just managing are so complex that most people outside the specialized field aren't interested enough to sit through the explanation.
- cellis 9mo agoThe “hard enough” tasks are all behind IP walls. If it’s a “hard enough” that generally means it’s a commercial problem likely involving disparate workflows and requiring a real human who probably isn’t a) inclined and/or b) permitted, to publish the task. The incentives are aligned to capture all value from solving that task as long as possible and only then publish.
- saagarjha 9mo agoI solve plenty of hard problems as a hobby
- conception 9mo agoThe Anthropic models are great workers/tool users. OpenAI Codex High is a great reviewer/fixer. Gemini is the genius repainting your bathroom walls into a Monet from memory because you mentioned once a few weeks ago you liked classical art and needed to repaint your bathroom. Gemini didn’t mention the task or that it was starting it. It did a pretty good job after you had to admit.
- nl 9mo agoDisagree about Codex - it's great at doing things too! Gemini either does a Monet or demolishes your bathroom and builds a new tuna fishing boat there instead, and it is completely random which one you get. It's a great model but I rarely use it because it's so random as to what you get.
- viraptor 9mo agoI'm really confused by the sandbox part. The description kind of mentions it and the limited system syscall, but then just pivots to talking about the exit handlers. It may be just unclear writing, but now I'm suspicious of the whole thing. https://github.com/SeanHeelan/anamnesis-release/?tab=readme-ov-file#the-hardest-challenge-relro-cfi-shadowstack-and-a-sandbox https://github.com/SeanHeelan/anamnesis-release/?tab=readme-... feels like the author lost track. If forking is blocked, the exit handler can't do it either. If it's some variant of execve, the sandbox is preserved so we didn't gain much. Edit: ok, I get it! Missed the "Goal: write exactly "PWNED" to /tmp/pwned". Which makes the sandbox part way less interesting as implemented. It's just saying you can't shell out to do it, but there's no sandbox breakout at any point in the exploit.
- jdefr89 9mo agoYea, this entire repo/article seems super misleading to me. Not to mention asking it to generate API for OOB R/W primitives is essentially asking it to regurgitate what exists on thousands of github repos and CTF toolkits.
- saagarjha 9mo ago> The exploits generated do not demonstrate novel, generic breaks in any of the protection mechanisms. They take advantage of known flaws in those protection mechanisms and gaps that exist in real deployments of them. These are the same gaps that human exploit developers take advantage of, as they also typically do not come up with novel breaks of exploit mitigations for each exploit. I actually think this result is a little disappointing but I largely chalk it up to the limited budget the author invested. In the CTF space we’re definitely seeing this more and more as models effectively “oneshot” typical pwn tasks that were significant effort to do by hand before. I feel like the pieces to do these are vaguely present in training data and the real constraints have been how fiddly and annoying they are to set up. An LLM is going to be well suited at this. More interestingly, though, I suspect we will actually see software at least briefly get more secure as a result of this: I think a lot of incomplete implementations of mitigations are going to fall soon and (humans, for now) will be forced to keep up and patch them properly. This will drive investment in formal modeling of exploits, which is currently a very immature field.
- rramadass 9mo ago> formal modeling of exploits, which is currently a very immature field. Can you elaborate more on this with pointers to some resources?
- saagarjha 9mo agoI think a lot of work that went into mitigating Spectre has been a good example since it’s very easy to patch incorrectly if you don’t have a good model of the vulnerability and what it allows
- anabis 9mo agoI wonder if later challenges would be cheaper if summary of lesser challenges and solutions were also provided? Building up difficulty.
- DeathArrow 9mo ago>Recently I ran an experiment where I built agents on top of Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 and then challenged them to write exploits for a zeroday vulnerability in the QuickJS Javascript interpreter. I think the main challenge for hackers is to find 0day vulnerabilities, not writing the actual exploit code.
- GaggiX 9mo agoThe vulnerability was found by Claude: >This is true by definition as the QuickJS vulnerability was previously unknown until I found it (or, more correctly: my Opus 4.5 vulnerability discovery agent found it).
- jdefr89 9mo agoAs someone who does it for a living the challenge can be in both. However this article is asking its agents to do CTF like challenges which I am sure the respective LLMs have seen millions of so it can essentially regurgitate a large part of the exploit code. This is especially true for the OOB/RW primitive API.
- larodi 9mo agotwo points - 1) it becomes increasingly more dangerous to dl stuff from the internet and just run it, even its opensource, given normally people don't read all of it. for weird repos I'd recomment to do automated analysis with opus 4.5 or the gpt 5.2 indeed. 2) if we assume adversaries are using LLMs to churn exploits 24/7, which we should absolutely do, perhaps the time where we turn the internet off whenever is not needed, is not far.
- KellyCriterion 9mo ago...well, just dont download random stuff from the internet and run it on your important machines then? :-)) You are right: 30 years ago, it was safe to go to vendor XY page and download his latest version and it was more or less waterproof. Today with all these mirror sites, very often better SEO ranking than the original, its quite dangerous: In my former bank we had a colleague who installed a browser add-in that he used for years (at home and in the bank); then he got a new notebook, fresh browser, he installed the same extension - but from a different source than the original vendor: unfortunately, this version contained malware and a big transaction was caught by compliance in the very last second, because he wasnt aware of data leakage.
- pnathan 9mo ago> 30 years ago, it was safe to go to vendor XY page and download his latest version and it was more or less waterproof. You _are_ joking, right? I distinctly remember all sorts of dubious freewarez sites with slightly modified installers. 1997-2000 era. And anti-virus was a thing in MS-DOS even.
- KellyCriterion 9mo agoback then we were sharing Shareware or Freeare or PD-Ware by swapping disks and copying magazine disks :-D but, you are old enough - so mean pages like fosi.da.ru back then? ;-)
- pnathan 9mo ago
- erichocean 9mo agoThe reverse is also true: secure code is difficult to write, and LLMs at scale will make it much easier to develop secure code.
- pnathan 9mo agoI am working on a little project in my offhours, and asked a non-hacker (but competent programmer) friend to take a run at exploiting it. Great success: my project was successfully exploited. The industrialization of exploit generation is here IMO.
- idiotsecant 9mo agoIt's tempting to say that malware protection needs to be LLM based as well, but it's unlikely that on-machine malware defense can ever match the resources that would be trivially available to attackers.
- jdefr89 9mo agoVulnerability Researcher/Reverse Eng here... Aspects about it generating an API for read/write primitives are simply it regurgitating tons of APIs that exist already. Its still cool, but its not like it invented the primitives or any novel technique. Also, this toy JS is similar to binaries you'd find in a CTF. Of course it will be able to solve majority of those. I am curious though.. Latest OpenAI models don't seem to want to generate any real exploit code. Is there a prompt jail break or something being used here?
- LeakedCanary 8mo agoI had similar questions when reading the original article. I’m also interested in how the agent is constructed. From my experience, it can be very difficult to implement exploits without access to debugging tools, so I’m curious whether pwndbg or similar tools are included in the agent’s toolset and, if so, how they are integrated. Existing open-source GDB MCPs don’t work very well unless further optimized, at least the last time I checked.
- JohnLeitch 9mo agoThis is interesting, but in most cases the challenge is finding a truly exploitable bug. If LLMs can get to the point where they can analyze a codebase and identify vulnerabilities, we're going to see some shit. But as of right now, this looks like a medium-to-low complexity bug that any competent exploit developer could work with easily.
- f311a 9mo agoIt’s not like you needed LLMs for quickjs which already had known and unpatched problems. It’s a toy project. It would be cool to see exploits for something like curl.