4 ms·

I have an open source project and started receiving a lot of security vulnerability reports in the last few months. A lot of them are extremely corner cases, bu

I have an open source project and started receiving a lot of security vulnerability reports in the last few months. A lot of them are extremely corner cases, but there were some legit ones. They're all fixed now. Closed source software won't receive any reports, but it will be exploited with AI. So I definitely agree with the message of this article.

Aurornis 6mo ago
> Closed source software won't receive any reports Not from the automated repo scanners, but bug bounty programs can generate a lot of reports in my experience. AI tools are becoming a problem there, too, because amateurs are drawn to the bounties and will submit anything the AI hallucinates. Closed source companies can (and should!) also run their own security audits rather than passively waiting for volunteers to spend their tokens on it.
- bearsyankees 6mo ago
  +1, at this point all companies need to be continuously testing their whole stack. The dumb scanners are now a thing of the past, the second your site goes live it will get slammed by the latest AI hackers
- tananaev 6mo ago
  Of course everyone should do their own due diligence, but my point is mostly that open source will have many more eyes and more effort put into it, both by owners, but also community.
  - LunicLynx 6mo ago
    But also tools that might not be nice and report security vulnerabilities, but exploit them. There is no guarantee that open means that they will be discovered.
- switchbak 6mo ago
  Those bug bounty programs now have to compete against the market for 0-days. I suppose they always did, but it seems the economics have changed in the favour of the bad actors - at least from my uninformed standpoint. That still exists in the OSS world too, having your code out there is no panacea. I think we'll see a real swarm of security issues across the board, but I would expect the OSS world to fare better (perhaps after a painful period).
- baileypumfleet 6mo ago
  That's absolutely our plan. We have bug bounty programs, we have internal AI scanners, we have manual penetration testing, and a number of other things that enable us to push really hard to find this stuff internally rather than relying on either the good people in the open source community or hackers to find our vulnerabilities.
- bmurphy1976 6mo ago
  You don't even need a bug bounty program. In my experience there's an army of individuals running low-quality security tools spamming every endpoint they can think (webmaster@ support@ contact@ gdpr@ etc.) with silly non-vulnerabilities asking for $100. They suck now but they will get more sophisticated over time.
  - deleted 6mo ago
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- 0x457 6mo ago
  > Not from the automated repo scanners, but bug bounty programs can generate a lot of reports in my experience. AI tools are becoming a problem there, too, because amateurs are drawn to the bounties and will submit anything the AI hallucinates So just like a pre-AI or worse?
  - shakna 6mo ago
    Worse. [0] [0] https://hackerone.com/reports/3595764 https://hackerone.com/reports/3595764
baq 6mo ago
given what the clankers can do unassisted and what more they can do when you give them ghidra, no software is 'closed source' anymore
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  Guess that kind of depends on your definition of "source", I personally wouldn't really agree with you here.
  - baq 6mo ago
    absolutely agree with you if we're talking about clean room reverse engineering; but in the context of finding vulnerabilities it's a completely different story
  - raddan 6mo ago
    I mean-- to an LLM is there really any difference between the actual source and disassembled source? Informative names and comments probably help them too, but it's not clear that they're necessary.
- criddell 6mo ago
  Which models have you had good luck with when working with ghidra? I analyze crash dumps for a Windows application. I haven't had much luck using Claude, OpenAI, or Google models when working with WinDbg. None of the models are very good at assembly and don't seem to be able to remember the details of different calling conventions or even how some of the registers are typically used. They are all pretty good at helping me navigate WinDbg though.
kirubakaran 6mo ago
Yes exactly! I'm so glad I took this route with my startup. We can't bury our heads in the sand and think the vulnerabilities don't exist just because we don't know about them.
- ofjcihen 6mo ago
  This might be the most painfully obvious advertisement I’ve ever seen on a forum.
  - kirubakaran 6mo ago
    I didn't mean it as such, but I can see why it would seem so. I've edited the link out now. Thanks for the feedback.
hardsnow 6mo ago
I’ve recently set up nightly automated pentest for my open-source project. I’m considering starting to publish these reports as proof of security posture. If the cost of security audit becomes marginal, it would seem reasonable to expect projects to publish results of such audits frequently. There’s probably a quite hefty backlog of medium- and low-severity issues in existing projects for maintainers to suffer through first though.
- Johnny_Bonk 6mo ago
  What do you use for the pentests? any oss libraries?
  - hardsnow 6mo ago
    This is a sandbox escape pentest so the only tooling needed is Claude Code and a simple prompt that asks it to follow a workflow: https://github.com/airutorg/airut/blob/main/workflows/sandbox-pentest.md https://github.com/airutorg/airut/blob/main/workflows/sandbo...
charcircuit 6mo ago
Assembly is still source code so really it comes down to if the copy protection is obscuring the executable code to the point where the LLM is not able to retrieve it on its own. And if it can't someone motivated could give it the extra help it needs to start tracing how outside inputs gets handled by the application.
rd 6mo ago
I don't follow. It seems obvious that there's more to gain for attackers using AI agents to exploit open source repositories, than there is for good samaritan defenders. In this new closed-source world (for Cal.com), there's nothing stopping them from running their own internal security agent audits, all whilst at least blocking the easiest method of finding zero-days - that is, being open source. This really just seems like Strix marketing. Which is totally fair, but let's be reasonable here, any open-source business stands to lose way more by continuing to be open-source vs. relying on the benevolence of people scanning their code for them.
- dgb23 6mo ago
  Isn’t that security by obscurity?
- NaritaAtrox 6mo ago
  Some users might be tech sensitive and have the capacity to check the codebase If a company want to use your platform, it can run an audit with its own staff These are people really concerned about the code, not "good samaritans"
- bigbadfeline 6mo ago
  > It seems obvious that there's more to gain for attackers using AI agents to exploit open source repositories, than there is for good samaritan defenders. Actually the opposite is obvious - the comment you replied too talked about an abundance of good Samaritan reports - it's strange to speculate on some nebulous "gain" when responding to facts about more then enough reports concerning open source code. > In this new closed-source world (for Cal.com), there's nothing stopping them from running their own internal security agent audits That's one good Samaritan for a closed source app vs many for an open source one. Open source wins again. > any open-source business stands to lose way more That doesn't make any sense - why would it lose more when it has many more good Samaritans working for it for free? You seem to forget that the number of vulnerabilities in a certain app is finite, an open source app will reach a secure status much faster than a closed source one, in addition to also gaining from shorter time to market. In fact, open source will soon be much better and more capable due to new and developing technological and organizational advancements which are next to impossible to happen under a closed source regime.
devstatic 6mo ago
i agree with his too, but with cal.com i dont think this is about security lol open source will always be an advantage just you need to decide wether it aligns with you business needs
cm2187 6mo ago
> Closed source software won't receive any reports, but it will be exploited with AI How so? AI won't have access to the source code. In some cases AI may have access to deployed binaries (if your business deploys binaries) but I am not aware that it has the same capabilities against compiled code than source code. But in a SAAS world, all AI has access to is your API. It might be still be up to no good but surely you will be several orders of magnitude less exposed than with access to source code.
- geoffschmidt 6mo ago
  Claude is already shockingly good at reverse engineering. Try it – it's really a step change. It has infinite patience which was always the limited resource in decompiling/deobfuscating most software.
  - evanelias 6mo ago
    It's SaaS though. You don't have access to the binary to decompile. There's only so much you can reverse-engineer through public URLs and APIs, especially if the SaaS uses any form of automatic detection of bot traffic.
    - zenmac 6mo ago
      Thanks you. This is what the parent post was trying to say. Don't know why it is down-voted. AI or not, if the API end points are well secured, for example use uuid-v7, then their is little that the ai can gain from just these points.
- advael 6mo ago
  The opposite is true. Open source barely matters to attackers, especially ones that can be automated. It mostly enables more people (or agents, or people with agents) to notice and fix your vulnerabilities. Secrecy and other asymmetries in the information landscape disproportionately benefit attackers, and the oft-repeated corporate claim that proprietary software is more secure is summarily discounted by most cybersecurity professionals, whether in industry or academic research. This is also seldom the motivation for making products proprietary, but it's more PR-friendly to claim that closing your source code is for security reasons than it is to say that it's for competitive advantage or control over your customers
lelanthran 6mo ago
> Closed source software won't receive any reports, but it will be exploited with AI. What makes you so sure that closed-source companies won't run those same AI scanners on their own code? It's closed to the public, it's not closed to them!
- LunicLynx 6mo ago
  Came here to say the same. Same tools + private. In security two different defense-mechanisms are always better than one.
  - bluebarbet 6mo ago
    Same tools A, B and C, but minus tools D, E and F, and with a smaller chance that any tools at all will even be used. Not claiming that it's a slam dunk for open source, but the inverse does not seem correct either.
    - LunicLynx 6mo ago
      Fair enough
    - lelanthran 6mo ago
      > Same tools A, B and C, but minus tools D, E and F, Why "minus D, E and F"? After all, once you have the harness set up, there's no additional work to add in new models, right?
      - bluebarbet 6mo ago
        The point being that there are always going to be more eyes, and more knowledge of available tools (i.e. including "D, E and F"), and more experience using them, with open source than with a single in-house dev team.
        lelanthran 6mo ago
        There's no more "eyes" though, it's all models, and they are all converging pretty damn fast.
baileypumfleet 6mo ago
We actually run AI scanners on our code internally, so we get the benefit of security through obscurity while also layering on AI vulnerability scanning, manual human penetration testing, and a huge array of other defence mechanisms.
- advael 6mo ago
  "Security through obscurity" is a term popularized entirely by the long-standing consensus among security researchers and any expert not being paid to say otherwise that this is a bad idea that doesn't work
giancarlostoro 6mo ago
> Closed source software won't receive any reports, but it will be exploited with AI. This is what worries me about companies sleeping on using AI to at a bare minimum run code audits and evaluate their security routinely. I suspect as models get better we're going to see companies being hacked at a level never seen before. Right now we've seen a few different maintainers for open source packages get hacked, who knows how many companies have someone infiltrating their internal systems with the help of AI because nobody wants to do the due dilligence of having a company do security audits on their systems.

Aurornis 6mo ago

> Closed source software won't receive any reports Not from the automated repo scanners, but bug bounty programs can generate a lot of reports in my experience. AI tools are becoming a problem there, too, because amateurs are drawn to the bounties and will submit anything the AI hallucinates. Closed source companies can (and should!) also run their own security audits rather than passively waiting for volunteers to spend their tokens on it.

bearsyankees 6mo ago
+1, at this point all companies need to be continuously testing their whole stack. The dumb scanners are now a thing of the past, the second your site goes live it will get slammed by the latest AI hackers
tananaev 6mo ago
Of course everyone should do their own due diligence, but my point is mostly that open source will have many more eyes and more effort put into it, both by owners, but also community.
- LunicLynx 6mo ago
  But also tools that might not be nice and report security vulnerabilities, but exploit them. There is no guarantee that open means that they will be discovered.
switchbak 6mo ago
Those bug bounty programs now have to compete against the market for 0-days. I suppose they always did, but it seems the economics have changed in the favour of the bad actors - at least from my uninformed standpoint. That still exists in the OSS world too, having your code out there is no panacea. I think we'll see a real swarm of security issues across the board, but I would expect the OSS world to fare better (perhaps after a painful period).
baileypumfleet 6mo ago
That's absolutely our plan. We have bug bounty programs, we have internal AI scanners, we have manual penetration testing, and a number of other things that enable us to push really hard to find this stuff internally rather than relying on either the good people in the open source community or hackers to find our vulnerabilities.
bmurphy1976 6mo ago
You don't even need a bug bounty program. In my experience there's an army of individuals running low-quality security tools spamming every endpoint they can think (webmaster@ support@ contact@ gdpr@ etc.) with silly non-vulnerabilities asking for $100. They suck now but they will get more sophisticated over time.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
0x457 6mo ago
> Not from the automated repo scanners, but bug bounty programs can generate a lot of reports in my experience. AI tools are becoming a problem there, too, because amateurs are drawn to the bounties and will submit anything the AI hallucinates So just like a pre-AI or worse?
- shakna 6mo ago
  Worse. [0] [0] https://hackerone.com/reports/3595764 https://hackerone.com/reports/3595764

baq 6mo ago

given what the clankers can do unassisted and what more they can do when you give them ghidra, no software is 'closed source' anymore

embedding-shape 6mo ago
Guess that kind of depends on your definition of "source", I personally wouldn't really agree with you here.
- baq 6mo ago
  absolutely agree with you if we're talking about clean room reverse engineering; but in the context of finding vulnerabilities it's a completely different story
- raddan 6mo ago
  I mean-- to an LLM is there really any difference between the actual source and disassembled source? Informative names and comments probably help them too, but it's not clear that they're necessary.
criddell 6mo ago
Which models have you had good luck with when working with ghidra? I analyze crash dumps for a Windows application. I haven't had much luck using Claude, OpenAI, or Google models when working with WinDbg. None of the models are very good at assembly and don't seem to be able to remember the details of different calling conventions or even how some of the registers are typically used. They are all pretty good at helping me navigate WinDbg though.

kirubakaran 6mo ago

Yes exactly! I'm so glad I took this route with my startup. We can't bury our heads in the sand and think the vulnerabilities don't exist just because we don't know about them.

ofjcihen 6mo ago
This might be the most painfully obvious advertisement I’ve ever seen on a forum.
- kirubakaran 6mo ago
  I didn't mean it as such, but I can see why it would seem so. I've edited the link out now. Thanks for the feedback.

hardsnow 6mo ago

I’ve recently set up nightly automated pentest for my open-source project. I’m considering starting to publish these reports as proof of security posture. If the cost of security audit becomes marginal, it would seem reasonable to expect projects to publish results of such audits frequently. There’s probably a quite hefty backlog of medium- and low-severity issues in existing projects for maintainers to suffer through first though.

Johnny_Bonk 6mo ago
What do you use for the pentests? any oss libraries?
- hardsnow 6mo ago
  This is a sandbox escape pentest so the only tooling needed is Claude Code and a simple prompt that asks it to follow a workflow: https://github.com/airutorg/airut/blob/main/workflows/sandbox-pentest.md https://github.com/airutorg/airut/blob/main/workflows/sandbo...

charcircuit 6mo ago

Assembly is still source code so really it comes down to if the copy protection is obscuring the executable code to the point where the LLM is not able to retrieve it on its own. And if it can't someone motivated could give it the extra help it needs to start tracing how outside inputs gets handled by the application.

rd 6mo ago

I don't follow. It seems obvious that there's more to gain for attackers using AI agents to exploit open source repositories, than there is for good samaritan defenders. In this new closed-source world (for Cal.com), there's nothing stopping them from running their own internal security agent audits, all whilst at least blocking the easiest method of finding zero-days - that is, being open source. This really just seems like Strix marketing. Which is totally fair, but let's be reasonable here, any open-source business stands to lose way more by continuing to be open-source vs. relying on the benevolence of people scanning their code for them.

dgb23 6mo ago
Isn’t that security by obscurity?
NaritaAtrox 6mo ago
Some users might be tech sensitive and have the capacity to check the codebase If a company want to use your platform, it can run an audit with its own staff These are people really concerned about the code, not "good samaritans"
bigbadfeline 6mo ago
> It seems obvious that there's more to gain for attackers using AI agents to exploit open source repositories, than there is for good samaritan defenders. Actually the opposite is obvious - the comment you replied too talked about an abundance of good Samaritan reports - it's strange to speculate on some nebulous "gain" when responding to facts about more then enough reports concerning open source code. > In this new closed-source world (for Cal.com), there's nothing stopping them from running their own internal security agent audits That's one good Samaritan for a closed source app vs many for an open source one. Open source wins again. > any open-source business stands to lose way more That doesn't make any sense - why would it lose more when it has many more good Samaritans working for it for free? You seem to forget that the number of vulnerabilities in a certain app is finite, an open source app will reach a secure status much faster than a closed source one, in addition to also gaining from shorter time to market. In fact, open source will soon be much better and more capable due to new and developing technological and organizational advancements which are next to impossible to happen under a closed source regime.

devstatic 6mo ago

i agree with his too, but with cal.com i dont think this is about security lol open source will always be an advantage just you need to decide wether it aligns with you business needs

cm2187 6mo ago

> Closed source software won't receive any reports, but it will be exploited with AI How so? AI won't have access to the source code. In some cases AI may have access to deployed binaries (if your business deploys binaries) but I am not aware that it has the same capabilities against compiled code than source code. But in a SAAS world, all AI has access to is your API. It might be still be up to no good but surely you will be several orders of magnitude less exposed than with access to source code.

geoffschmidt 6mo ago
Claude is already shockingly good at reverse engineering. Try it – it's really a step change. It has infinite patience which was always the limited resource in decompiling/deobfuscating most software.
- evanelias 6mo ago
  It's SaaS though. You don't have access to the binary to decompile. There's only so much you can reverse-engineer through public URLs and APIs, especially if the SaaS uses any form of automatic detection of bot traffic.
  - zenmac 6mo ago
    Thanks you. This is what the parent post was trying to say. Don't know why it is down-voted. AI or not, if the API end points are well secured, for example use uuid-v7, then their is little that the ai can gain from just these points.
advael 6mo ago
The opposite is true. Open source barely matters to attackers, especially ones that can be automated. It mostly enables more people (or agents, or people with agents) to notice and fix your vulnerabilities. Secrecy and other asymmetries in the information landscape disproportionately benefit attackers, and the oft-repeated corporate claim that proprietary software is more secure is summarily discounted by most cybersecurity professionals, whether in industry or academic research. This is also seldom the motivation for making products proprietary, but it's more PR-friendly to claim that closing your source code is for security reasons than it is to say that it's for competitive advantage or control over your customers

lelanthran 6mo ago

> Closed source software won't receive any reports, but it will be exploited with AI. What makes you so sure that closed-source companies won't run those same AI scanners on their own code? It's closed to the public, it's not closed to them!

LunicLynx 6mo ago
Came here to say the same. Same tools + private. In security two different defense-mechanisms are always better than one.
- bluebarbet 6mo ago
  Same tools A, B and C, but minus tools D, E and F, and with a smaller chance that any tools at all will even be used. Not claiming that it's a slam dunk for open source, but the inverse does not seem correct either.
  - LunicLynx 6mo ago
    Fair enough
  - lelanthran 6mo ago
    > Same tools A, B and C, but minus tools D, E and F, Why "minus D, E and F"? After all, once you have the harness set up, there's no additional work to add in new models, right?
    - bluebarbet 6mo ago
      The point being that there are always going to be more eyes, and more knowledge of available tools (i.e. including "D, E and F"), and more experience using them, with open source than with a single in-house dev team.
      - lelanthran 6mo ago
        There's no more "eyes" though, it's all models, and they are all converging pretty damn fast.

baileypumfleet 6mo ago

We actually run AI scanners on our code internally, so we get the benefit of security through obscurity while also layering on AI vulnerability scanning, manual human penetration testing, and a huge array of other defence mechanisms.

advael 6mo ago
"Security through obscurity" is a term popularized entirely by the long-standing consensus among security researchers and any expert not being paid to say otherwise that this is a bad idea that doesn't work

giancarlostoro 6mo ago

> Closed source software won't receive any reports, but it will be exploited with AI. This is what worries me about companies sleeping on using AI to at a bare minimum run code audits and evaluate their security routinely. I suspect as models get better we're going to see companies being hacked at a level never seen before. Right now we've seen a few different maintainers for open source packages get hacked, who knows how many companies have someone infiltrating their internal systems with the help of AI because nobody wants to do the due dilligence of having a company do security audits on their systems.