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cURL removes bug bounties
- eknkc 9mo agoA list of the slop if anyone is interested: https://gist.github.com/bagder/07f7581f6e3d78ef37dfbfc81fd1d1cd https://gist.github.com/bagder/07f7581f6e3d78ef37dfbfc81fd1d...
- shusaku 9mo ago> To replicate the issue, I have searched in the Bard about this vulnerability. Seeing Bard mentioned as an LLM takes me back :)
- golem14 9mo agoI looked at two reports, and I can’t tell if the reports are directly from an ai or some very junior student not really understanding security. LLms to me sound generally more convincing.
- mirekrusin 9mo agoSome (most?) are llm chat copy paste addressing non existing users in conversations like [0] - what a waste of time. [0] https://hackerone.com/reports/2298307 https://hackerone.com/reports/2298307
- golem14 9mo agoYeah, that one is pretty clearly written with the help of AI. This could well be the work of a larger group, say a state actor, trying to overwhelm reviewers and crowd out real reports. And if not yet, then for sure going forward ...
- plastic041 9mo agoIn the second report, Daniel greeted the slopper very kindly and tried to start a conversation with them. But the slopper calls him by the completely wrong name. And this was December 2023. It must have been extremely tiring.
- johncoltrane 9mo ago> slopper First new word of 2026. Thank you.
- andrewflnr 9mo agoSlop-monger is the term I've seen, and the more evocative one I think.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo agoHonestly infuriating to read. I'm so surprised cURL put up with this for so long
- worldsavior 9mo agoAll of those reports are clearly AI and it's weird seeing the staff not recognizing it as AI and being serious.
- ares623 9mo agoOrc, meet hobbits.
- potatoproduct 9mo agoI thought the same, except I realised some of the reports were submitted back in 2023 before AI slop exploded.
- ChrisRR 9mo agoThey're very clearly AI when you're told that it's a list of AI. But when you're given a mixed list of AI and genuine reports, I bet it's not so simple and very time consuming
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- dlcarrier 9mo agoAn entry fee that is reimbursed if the bug turns out to matter would stop this, real quick. Then again, I once submitted a bug report to my bank, because the login method could be switched from password+pin to pin only, when not logged in, and they closed it as "works as intended", because they had decided that an optional password was more convenient than a required password. (And that's not even getting into the difference between real two-factor authentication the some-factor one-and-a-half-times they had implemented by adding a PIN to a password login.) I've since learned that anything heavily regulated like hospitals and banks will have security procedures catering to compliance, not actual security. Assuming the host of the bug bounty program is operating in good faith, adding some kind of barrier to entry or punishment for untested entries will weed out submitters acting in bad faith.
- gamer191 9mo agoAgreed, although the reimbursement should be based on whether a reasonable person could consider that to be a vulnerability. Often it’s tricky for outsiders to tell whether a behaviour is expected or a vulnerability
- dlcarrier 9mo agoYeah, the reimbursement would need to be for a good-faith submission worth considering, even if it wasn't actionable.
- fredrikholm 9mo ago> An entry fee that is reimbursed if the bug turns out to matter would stop this, real quick. I refer to this as the Notion-to-Confluence cost border. When Notion first came out, it was snappy and easy to use. Creating a page being essentially free of effort, you very quickly had thousands of them, mostly useless. Confluence, at least in west EU, is offensively slow. The thought of adding a page is sufficiently demoralizing that it's easier to update an existing page and save yourself minutes of request time outs. Consequently, there's some ~20 pages even in large companies. I'm not saying that sleep(15 * SECOND) is the way to counter, but once something becomes very easy to do at scale, it explodes to the point where the original utility is now lost in a sea of noise.
- plastic041 9mo agorelated: cURL stopped HackerOne bug bounty program due to excessive slop reports https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46678710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46678710
- novalis78 9mo agoJust use an LLM to weed them out. What’s so hard about that?
- eqvinox 9mo agoAt this point it's impossible to tell if this is sarcasm or not. Brave new world we got there.
- vee-kay 9mo agoSet a thief to catch a thief.
- bootsmann 9mo agoIf AI can't be trusted to write bug reports, why should it be trusted to review them?
- GalaxyNova 9mo agoBecause LLMs are bad at reviewing code for the same reasons they are bad at making it? They get tricked by fancy clean syntax and take long descriptions / comments for granted without considering the greater context.
- colechristensen 9mo agoI don't know, I prompted Opus 4.5 "Tell me the reasons why this report is stupid" on one of the example slop reports and it returned a list of pretty good answers.[1] Give it a presumption of guilt and tell it to make a list, and an LLM can do a pretty good job of judging crap. You could very easily rig up a system to give this "why is it stupid" report and then grade the reports and only let humans see the ones that get better than a B+. If you give them the right structure I've found LLMs to be much better at judging things than creating them. Opus' judgement in the end: "This is a textbook example of someone running a sanitizer, seeing output, and filing a report without understanding what they found." 1. https://claude.ai/share/8c96f19a-cf9b-4537-b663-b1cb771bfe3f https://claude.ai/share/8c96f19a-cf9b-4537-b663-b1cb771bfe3f
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46617410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46617410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46678710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46678710
- jameslk 9mo agoIt seems open source loses the most from AI. Open source code trained the models, the models are being used to spam open source projects anywhere there's incentive, they can be used to chip away at open source business models by implementing paid features and providing the support, and eventually perhaps AI simply replaces most open source code
- giancarlostoro 9mo agoI wouldn't say open source code solely trained the models, surely there are CS courses and textbooks, official documentation as well as transcripts of talks and courses all factor in as well. On another note, regarding AI replacing most open source code. I forget what tool it was, but I had a need for a very niche way of accessing an old Android device it was rooted, but if I used something like Disk Drill it would eventually crap out empty files. So I found a GUI someone made, and started asking Claude to add things I needed for it to a) let me preview directories it was seeing and b) let me sudo up, and let me download with a reasonable delay (1s I think) which basically worked, I never had issues again, it was a little slow to recover old photos, but oh well. I debated pushing the code changes back into github, it works as expected, but it drifted from the maintainers own goals I'm sure.
- ValveFan6969 9mo ago"open source" and "business model" in the same sentence... next you're gonna tell me to eat pudding with a fork.
- jameslk 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc... I think you should try eating pudding with a fork next
- bigstrat2003 9mo agoI mean... not what the other poster meant, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_toffee_pudding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_toffee_pudding exists and is absolutely delicious.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- ares623 9mo agoAlternate headline: AI discovering so many exploits that cybersecurity can't keep up Am I doing this right?
- bawolff 9mo agoThere is a difference between AI discovering real vulnerabilities (e.g. the ffmpeg situation), and AI being used to spam fake vulnerabilities
- groundzeros2015 9mo ago> the ffmpeg situation How do you know that?
- bawolff 9mo agoBecause the vulnerability was published and it appeared real.
- groundzeros2015 9mo agoI’m sure AI also found real vulnerabilities on cURL. My question is why you know cURL is being “spammed” but that FFMPEG is just getting legitimate problems.
- bawolff 9mo ago> I’m sure AI also found real vulnerabilities on cURL. The curl maintainer published the reports and they were very clearly not security vulnerabilities in curl. > My question is why you know cURL is being “spammed” but that FFMPEG is just getting legitimate problems. To put it bluntly, because i can read. Did you actually read the reports in question?
- groundzeros2015 9mo ago> because i can read So you looked their the bug list and then the source code and found which issues were legitimate or someone did so on your behalf?
- bilekas 9mo agoI just read one of the slop submissions and it's baffling how anyone could submit these with a straight face. https://hackerone.com/reports/3293884 https://hackerone.com/reports/3293884 Not even understanding the expected behaviour and then throwing as much slop as possible to see what sticks is the problem with generative AI.
- nusl 9mo agoThey don't care. They generate large amounts of these, spam them out, and hope for some small success. If they get banned or blocked, they make new accounts. Shame isn't even a factor; it's all about money. They don't even attempt to understand or care about a product. This was partially the case before, where you'd still get weird spammy or extortive reports, but I guess LLMs enable random people to shoot their shot and gum up the works even more.
- timeon 9mo ago> Shame isn't even a factor That is general trend in society now.
- eproxus 9mo agoThat's because we stopped calling others out for shameful, disrespectful or unethical behavior as a rule. So there is less or nothing to be ashamed about anymore.
- M2Ys4U 9mo agoWorse, the rule became to reverse the victim and offender,[0] and belittle those calling out the behaviour as "woke" or "suppressing free speech".
- epolanski 9mo agoIt's a human problem, not a tool one.
- Snakes3727 9mo agoThe company I work for has a pretty bad bounty system (basically a security@corp email). We have a demo system and a public API with docs. We get around 100 or more emails a day now. Most of it is slop, scams, or my new favourite AI security companies sending us an AI generated pentest un prompted filled with false positives, untrue things, etc. It has become completely useless so no one looks at it. I had a sales rep even call me up basically trying to book a 3 hour session to review the AI findings unprompted. When I looked at the nearly 250 page report, and saw a critical IIS bug for Windows server (doesn't exist) existing at a scanned IP address of 5xx.x.x.x (yes an impossible IP) publically available in AWS (we exclusively use gcp) I said some very choice words.
- andrewmcwatters 9mo ago[dead]
- empath75 9mo agoI had a customer _turn off an entire kubernetes cluster in production_ because of a single hallucinated security finding.
- nottorp 9mo agoWhat I wonder is if this will actually reduce the amount of slop. Bounties are a motivation, but there's also promotional purposes. Show that you submitted thousands of security reports to major open source software and you're suddenly a security expert. Remember the little iot thing that got on here because of a security report complaining, among other things, that the linux on it did not use systemd?
- bawolff 9mo agoI dont think bounties make you an "expert". If you want to be deemed an expert, write blogs detailing how the exploit works. You can do that without a bounty. In many ways one of the biggest benefits of bug bounties is having a dedicated place where you can submit reports and you know the person on the other end wants them and isn't going to threaten to sue you. For the most part, the money in a bug bounty isn't work the effort needed to actually find stuff. The exception seens to be when you find some basic bug, that you can automate scan half the internet and submit to 100 different bug bounties.
- nottorp 9mo ago> I dont think bounties make you an "expert". It depends to who. > If you want to be deemed an expert, write blogs detailing how the exploit works. That's necessary if you sell your services to people likely to enjoy HN.
- Tade0 9mo agoI have a suspicion that most sloppers won't even get the memo about the discontinuation of the bounty program.
- Springtime 9mo agoOutside of direct monetary gain like bounties are efforts to just stand out, in terms of being able to show contributions to a large project or getting say a CVE. Stenberg has actually written about invalid/wildly overrated vulnerabilities that get assigned CVEs on their blog a few times and those were made by humans. I often get the sense some of these aren't just misguided reporters but deliberate attempts to make mountains out of molehills for reputation reasons. Things like this seem harder to account for as an incentive.
- arjie 9mo agoIt makes sense. This process of searching for bugs was slow and time-consuming so it needed to be incentivized. This is no longer the case. Now the hard part is in identifying which ones are real. To paraphrase a famous quote: AI-equipped bug hunters find 100 out of every 3 serious vulnerabilities.
- wrxd 9mo ago> Now the hard part is in identifying which ones are real. So it’s still a slow and time consuming process.
- arjie 9mo agoTragically expository, wrxd. My facetiousness condemned through explanation.
- StrauXX 9mo agoThe process of finding bugs is still slow and time consuming. The kinds of vulnerabilities you find in codebases like cURL are still beyond AI. Binary exploitation is still a human only field.
- doe88 9mo agoFunny how we are now sensitivized to these AI slops, at first I fixated on the En dashes in the lead of the article, made me doubt of the article's author for a few seconds.
- StrauXX 9mo agoThe solution for this, IMO, is flags. Just like with CTFs, host an instance of your software with a flag that can only be retrieved after a successful exploit. If someone submits the flag to you, there is no argueing about wether or not they found a valid vulnerability. Yes, this does not work for all vulnerability classes, but it is the best compromise in my mind.
- snowmobile 9mo agoHow exactly would that work? Curl isn't exactly software that can be "hosted" somewhere, and I'm not sure where you'd hide the flag in the software? Either very few actual vulns would end up being able to retrieve the flag, or it would be trivial to retrieve the flag without an exploit.
- zvqcMMV6Zcr 9mo agoIn most basic form it would just be form with URL that (lib)curl is later supposed to fetch. And target server (controlled by researcher) is supposed to send payload that triggers RCE in client. Sure, it covers a very narrow scope but I am afraid the bigger issue would be that it is going to get spammed with submitted links. And those links will often be to strait up illegal content, it might not matter that such server instantly deletes all downloaded files.
- StrauXX 9mo agoSimple. You multiple instances with different flags covering different threat models. RCE, file read, etc. You then expose a webapplication for every instance that lets users control only those curl flags, that must be safe to be user controlled in the reapective threat model.
- ILoveHorses 9mo agoA video showing some of the gems which most likely led to this frustration: https://youtu.be/8w6r4MKSe4I?si=7nfRd0VmX8tvXAnY https://youtu.be/8w6r4MKSe4I?si=7nfRd0VmX8tvXAnY
- 72deluxe 9mo agoI started watching it but the modern presentation style of shouting everything instead of speaking at a normal volume, and using many many gestures and facial expressions to state a simple sentence made me switch it off rapidly. It seems to be a presentation style afflicting the YouTube generation, where they think you want to see a colossal microphone in someone's face (directional microphones work very well, and is a reason you can hear dialogue in a film without a mic in front of everyone) whilst they gesticulate wildly and over-emphasise words in a sentence. It is quite wearying; perhaps it's because I am British, but it is afflicting general conversation where only superlatives can be used ("awesome" "amazing" "insane" "mind-blowing") instead of "good"/"enjoyable".
- ILoveHorses 9mo agoI guess that's modern yt. At least it's not an AI slop channel.
- 72deluxe 9mo agoThat's true, but still it's small mercies!
- sockmeistr 9mo agoArchive mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20260121081507/https://etn.se/index.php/nyheter/72808-curl-removes-bug-bounties.html https://web.archive.org/web/20260121081507/https://etn.se/in...
- skirge 9mo agoFree work eventually turns out not to be free at all.
- MrJobbo 9mo agoSmart, bug bounties are a huge PITA.
- MORPHOICES 9mo ago[dead]
- shevy-java 9mo agoSo AI slop is used to attempt to degrade the quality of cURL.
- rob74 9mo ago> “Not much. The real incentive for finding a vulnerability in cURL is the fame ('brand is priceless'), not the hundred or few thousand dollars. $10,000 (maximum cURL bounty) is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, for somebody capable of finding a critical vulnerability in curl.” That's the choice as seen from the perspective of a white-hat hacker. But for an exploitable vulnerability, the real choice is to sell it to malware producers (I'm including state-sponsored spyware companies like the makers of Pegasus in this category) for a lot of money, or do the more moral thing and earn at least a little bit of money via a bug bounty program.
- smallpipe 9mo agoHopefully the malware authors have the same issue of filtering through garbage AI submission
- snowmobile 9mo agoThat's a story that people like to tell to justify bug bounty programs, but it strikes me as very unlikely that some random pentester / white-hat hacker would have access to communication with malware producers. Black-hat hackers seem entirely unreasonable to deal with, you'd have to manage some sort of escrow payment (because neither party trusts the other) probably through cryptocurrency, and then deal with laundering the money, et cetera. Perhaps one could as you theorize, go to some private company, but it'd have to be at least somewhat approved by the white-hat hacker's own government lest they risk legal trouble, and I'm still dubious that the company would be all that willing to pay for some "freelance hacker's" supposed vuln. The logistics just don't make sense.
- notepad0x90 9mo agoThis is silly, people don't need AI to send you garbage. If your project is getting lots of junk reports, you should take it as a good sign, that people are looking at it a lot now. You don't remove the incentive, you ask for help to triage the junk. Curl is a popular and well supported tool, if it needs help in this area, there will be a long line of competent people not volunteering their time and/or money. If you need help, get more help. don't use "AI slop" as an excuse to remove the one incentive people have to not sell exploits or just hoard them.
- usrbinbash 9mo ago> This is silly, people don't need AI to send you garbage People also don't need cigarettes to fall ill. But smoking still causes health problems.
- notepad0x90 9mo agoWhat's your point? Because people smoke cigarettes, people who buy unrelated things should be punished? Or because a store sells cigarettes, stores in general shouldn't be paid for what they sell? Or is the time and effort to find vulns valueless?
- usrbinbash 9mo agoThe point is that "can happen without [THING] as well" does not mean the argument "[THING]s existence exacerbates the problem" is wrong.
- notepad0x90 9mo agoNo, the implication that "THING" is the cause of something and therefore something needs to be done must withstand the scrutiny of "other THINGS" also causing that thing, and therefore the solution is attacking either only one cause or not the real root cause. The fact that bad reports have to be triage doesn't change with AI. What changed is the volume, clearly. So the reasonable response is not to blame "AI" but to ask for help with the added volume. If HN gets flooded by AI spam, is the right response shutting down HN? spam is spam whether AI does it or a dedicated and coordinated large numbers of humans do it. The problem doesn't change because of who is causing it in this case.
- memesarecool 9mo agoHackerone (where cURL hosted their bounty program) tracks the reputation of bounty hunters. I don't understand why they are not taking advantage of this. Make a private program, invite only hackers who have proved themselves by submitting relevant reports.
- spiffyk 9mo agoSay all projects did just that, only allowing reports from proven hackers. How does a new hacker then prove themselves?
- sillywabbit 9mo agoStart a lemonade stand?
- GuinansEyebrows 9mo agoi think that hypothetical is too simplistic to accurately frame the situation. we're talking about one of the largest, most widely used libraries in the open source world. at that level, they don't really need unknowns to use their project to "prove themselves" - they can contribute to smaller projects or put their own work out into the world.
- GeorgeOldfield 9mo agofind bugs for free at first. implement negative reputation for BS bugs
- empath75 9mo agohttps://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-slops/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s... most of them are new users or will just create a new account if their reputation gets hit.
- Retr0id 9mo agoI'm not sure how effective this will be. A lot of AI-generated bug bounty reports are pure spam, but a significant fraction are well-meaning humans who genuinely believe the nonsense an LLM has given them. The former category do not read the rules in the first place and will not be deterred - spray and pray is their MO. The second category will not believe that any "no slop" rules apply to them, because they genuinely think their bug is real.
- druvisc 9mo agoWhy did “AI slop” disappear from the title?
- pavel_lishin 9mo agoProbably because it wasn't in the actual submission title.
- ykurtov 9mo agoIt's really hard to comprehend how entitled "reward which would be the cost of lunch in Sweden can be massive for those low socio-economic-located people" is. A lunch in central Stockholm is well within 200 kronor. I can't imagine a country where an person with a computer and skills necessary to claim a bounty in cURL would consider that amount massive. Get real.
- pnt12 9mo agoIs he entitled for considering the difficultied from developing countries? Maybe he's exaggerating a bit with the comparison, but if we consider the ceiling of 10k, that's more than a year of minimum wage in Portugal, or a handful of years in certain developing counties. Certainly significant!