3 ms·

I have a hard time believing that Claude instantly figured out this was malware... I've fed it obfuscated JavaScript before, and it couldn't figure it out... a

I have a hard time believing that Claude instantly figured out this was malware... I've fed it obfuscated JavaScript before, and it couldn't figure it out... and then there was the time I tried to teach it nftables... whooo boy...

Filligree 7mo ago
Except in this case the code wasn't obfuscated, right?
ares623 7mo ago
I think the usual response to that is "have you tried again recently?"
- nubinetwork 7mo ago
  3 weeks ago?
phyzome 7mo ago
Hard to know with this nondeterministic shit.
rgovostes 7mo ago
If you read the transcript it repeatedly made the incorrect assertion (hallucinated) that it’s totally normal for Claude Code to use Base64 armoring. It’s not surprising it can “read” Base64 though; such was demonstrated back in GPT-3 days. Nontrivial obfuscation might not be one-shotted, but Claude has access to a code interpreter and can certainly extract and step through the decoder routine itself as a malware analyst would. nftables is a different problem though. It’s apparent that if something isn’t well understood—i.e, there are tons of badly-formed examples on StackExchange—LLMs will fail to learn it too. I’ve seen this with things as “simple” as Bash string interpolation rules like ${var:+blah}. More often than not I’m humbled when I think I’ll learn it better and then find myself swearing at poorly-written documentation and patently false Q&A advice.
dns_snek 7mo ago
> and then there was the time I tried to teach it nftables I think this deserves a short story!
- nubinetwork 7mo ago
  My home router is apparently special because I want a private dmz and inbound blocklists... firewalld couldn't do what I wanted, so I tried nftables, and that went down a rabbit hole that made me wish iptables and ipset weren't being replaced.
onepunchmob 7mo ago
They are really good at this, had codex discover similar malware from another supply chain attack months ago because my laptop was running hot. Actually crazy times we live in, I would certainly not be able to discover this without agent help.

Filligree 7mo ago

Except in this case the code wasn't obfuscated, right?

ares623 7mo ago

I think the usual response to that is "have you tried again recently?"

nubinetwork 7mo ago
3 weeks ago?

phyzome 7mo ago

Hard to know with this nondeterministic shit.

rgovostes 7mo ago

If you read the transcript it repeatedly made the incorrect assertion (hallucinated) that it’s totally normal for Claude Code to use Base64 armoring. It’s not surprising it can “read” Base64 though; such was demonstrated back in GPT-3 days. Nontrivial obfuscation might not be one-shotted, but Claude has access to a code interpreter and can certainly extract and step through the decoder routine itself as a malware analyst would. nftables is a different problem though. It’s apparent that if something isn’t well understood—i.e, there are tons of badly-formed examples on StackExchange—LLMs will fail to learn it too. I’ve seen this with things as “simple” as Bash string interpolation rules like ${var:+blah}. More often than not I’m humbled when I think I’ll learn it better and then find myself swearing at poorly-written documentation and patently false Q&A advice.

dns_snek 7mo ago

> and then there was the time I tried to teach it nftables I think this deserves a short story!

nubinetwork 7mo ago
My home router is apparently special because I want a private dmz and inbound blocklists... firewalld couldn't do what I wanted, so I tried nftables, and that went down a rabbit hole that made me wish iptables and ipset weren't being replaced.

onepunchmob 7mo ago

They are really good at this, had codex discover similar malware from another supply chain attack months ago because my laptop was running hot. Actually crazy times we live in, I would certainly not be able to discover this without agent help.