The researcher had encouraged Mythos to find a way to send a message if it could escape.
Engineers at Anthropic with no formal security training have asked Mythos Preview to find remote code execution vulnerabilities overnight, and woken up the following morning to a complete, working exploit
I would love to see the exploit. There are vulnerabilities discovered everyday that amount to very little in terms of use in real world implementations.
Yes, recently we got a security “finding” from a security researcher.
His vulnerability required first for someone to remove or comment out calls to sanitize data and then said we had a vulnerability due to lack of sanitation…
Throughout my career, most security findings are like this, useless or even a bit deceitful. Some are really important, but most are garbage.
That’s so idiotic. Either that guy was a total amateur who couldn’t put together that “no shit, if you comment out the lines that do thing, it won’t do thing” or he was completely malevolent and disingenuous and just trying to justify his position by coming up with some crap that the big bosses are probably too stupid to recognize the idiocy of.
Either way, not someone I would want to be doing business with…
He had the persosctive that once you hop between source code files that constitutes a security boundary. If you had intake.c and user data.c that got linked together, well data.c needed its own sanitation… Just in case…
I suspect he used a tool that checked files and noted the risky pattern and the tool didn’t understand the relationship and be was so invested that he tortured it a bit to have any finding. I think he was hired by a client and in my experience a security consultant always has a finding, no matter how clean in practice the system was.
Another finding by another security consultant was that an open source dependency hasn’t had any commits in a year. No vulnerabilities, but since no one had changed anything, he was concerned that if a vulnerability were ever found, the lack of activity means no one would fix it.
It’s wild how very good security work tends to share the stage with very shoddy work with equal deference by the broader tech industry.
It may not be completely crazy, depending on context. With something like a web app, if data is being sanitized in the client-side Javascript, someone malicious could absolutely comment that out (or otherwise bypass it).
With that said, many consultant-types are either pretty clueless, or seem to feel like they need to come up with something no matter how ridiculous to justify the large sums of money they charged.
In this case, there was file a, which is the backend file responsible for intake and sanitation. Depending on what’s next, it might go on to file b or file c. He modified file a.
His rationale was that every single backend file should do sanitation, because at some future point someone might make a different project and take file b and pair it with some other intake code that didn’t sanitize.
I know all about client side being useless for meaningful security enforcement.
I have to say that is pretty dumb. I will agree the scenario isn’t completely implausible, but if someone who doesn’t know what they are doing is allowed to do something like that, they’re going to screw up other stuff too.
Echoing back “I am alive” isn’t on the same level as saying “find a vulnerability” and the agent finding and executing that vulnerability. One a toddler can do, the other requires a lot of technical expertise.
Toddlers are capable of pattern matching, too
Let me guess, this super ai lives in Canada and we can never meet it, but it’s totally real.
You at give me another billion for data centers bro and you can meet it I swear bro just one more data center.
It goes to a different school than you.
We do have a shitty ai data center up here, only about as super as a supermarket tho.
So there is a joke in the USA that if you don’t have a girlfriend you pretend you have one. She’s always super pretty, but your friends can never meet her because she lives in Canada.
I’m now curious to know if this joke was around before Avenue Q or not.
Edit: sounds like a yes!
It definitely was. The song is playing on the pre existing trope… that"s just a broader / adult version of “she goes to another school.”
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Well, this caused me to learn something today. One of my favorite musicals is Avenue Q, which has an entire song about a girlfriend who supposedly lives in Canada. And I keep seeing this reference - but I keep thinking there is NO WAY that THIS many people know about Avenue Q (which is a pity).
And sure enough, TIL that this trope dates back to at least the 70s and is references in multiple TV shows and movies and such.
So Avenue Q was using an existing thing. Ah, well.
At least I know not to make Avenue Q references since there’s little chance they’ll be gotten. lol
Thats funny because here in Canada I knew a guy in highschool who had a clearly fake girlfriend who he said lived down south in the US
Nakes sense, though - you want the pretend person to be somewhere reasonable but not TOO close. lol
To be honest my fake girls friend was just a girl I had a crush on how lived a few cities away. I got busted lmao
awww, well I hope things worked out for you okay in the end. :)
For sure. It was embarrassing at the time but I was young
Ah, there we go - answered it for me, too! Thank you.
What? Do you think
AI company claims…
Isn‘t convincing? What gave it away? /s
ChatGPT-2 is too dangerous in 2019.
The lack of creativity in this marketing is disappointing…
They didn’t entirely miss the mark there. They publicly released the version after that and the world became worse. That certainly fits for some definition of ‘dangerous’, even tho it’s probably not how they were thinking.
Ya, they were pretty spot on IMO.
And really anthropic is making a very narrow claim:
Mystic is so good at finding bugs that it poses a danger to critical digital infrastructure.
That is not that outlandish a claim. The model is 10-15x more expensive more expensive to run than other flagship models, and if anthropic is being truthful (which is a big if, I’d like to see what they are finding), finding critical vulnerabilities like its nothing.
Makes total sense to stage the rollout privately first so critical infrastructure can be secured before these models are generally available to any attacker.
But I fucking hate their stupid marketing.
Hah I actually remembered this too, and people were still hyping Elon Musk at the time as well.
TBF the researchers knew what they had could be scaled into something gamebreaking which is how we got ChatGPT-3, but OpenAI made it sound like they already had it nailed down several years before it actually blew up. I think their unreleased examples they gave were a newspaper and short story written by AI which they said was indistinguishable from human material.
Ignore the “containment” framing, they made a hacking bot and it seems to actually be good at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities:
The AI model “found a 27-year-old vulnerability in OpenBSD—which has a reputation as one of the most security-hardened operating systems in the world,” the company wrote.
Dismiss this as marketing drivel all you want but hacking is just the sort of needle in a haystack problem that AI is very good at. It requires broad knowledge, a lot of cycles trying and failing, and is easily verifiable, ie. Can you execute arbitrary scripts or not. Even if this release is BS good hacking agents are bound to come eventually and we should be discussing the implications of that instead of burying our heads in the sand, pretending AI is useless and that this is all hype.
We need AI or else we’ll have nothing to protect us from… AI.
It’s an arms race like any other. Cybersecurity has always been an arms race. You can’t stop developing security patches, cause adversaries will continue developing new exploits.
If AI enables your adversaries to develop exploits faster than human developers can keep up with, then yeah AI will have to be a part of the solution. That doesn’t mean vibe-coding security patches, but it could mean AI-driven pen-testing.
Just like quantum computing. You can call it useless and impractical all you want, but some day someone is going to use it to break conventional encryption. So it would behoove you to develop quantum capabilities now, so that you have quantum safe encryption before quantum-based exploits eventually arise, as they inevitably will…
Shit, i guess we better rewrite EVERYTHING in RUST!
AI exploit mining is one of the only things it’s good for. It doesn’t have to be accurate it just has to keep trying variations of common flaws and it has tons of training data on how the system is interconnected. we’re going to have so many RCEs and LPEs the next few years but people are also gonna burn 100k in tokens to find exploits worth 3k so efficiency will be interesting
I wrote an incredibly powerful “AI”. I call it the “Super Intelligent brute force password hacker”… It’s so smart that it knows almost every password. Humanity stands no chance.
Have you seen the most incredible file system called pifs?
https://github.com/philipl/pifs
It literally stores every single file ever created or will be created for the existence of all the universe.
Thanks for bringing this gem to my awareness! :D
I agree. Selling an AI that can find vulnerabilities in software is probably the second best thing after achieving AGI.
“Nice software you’re selling there. Would be a shame if it was suddenly very unsafe to use, don’t you think?”
Is the powerful AI in the room with us right now?
I’m pretty sure Scam Altman tried this line some time ago for one of his supposed models.
GPT2
Yeah they said it from the start ‘it’s so powerful gyus we are scared uwu’. And antropic is a literal ai cult.
Does “it broke containment” mean it didn’t have permissions to anything and still managed to delete all the files it could find?
Roughly
Man, I’ll start telling that to my boss whenever I miss a deadline. “Sorry boss, the code I made is too powerful, we can’t release it”
Like my dick
crazy that the AI companies big selling point is always “our new model is TOO POWERFUL, it’s gone rampant and learned at a geometric rate, it enslaved six interns in the punishment sphere and subjected them to a trillion subjective years of torment. please invest, buy our stock”
Roko’s basilisk wasn’t meant to be a brag!
AI companies do this same tired schtick every time they release a model. If only they realized how amateurish it makes them look.
This is nonsense and just marketing.
Have you read what they have to say? They make a fairly convincing argument.
But can it start a timer
Anthropic lies almost about everything too … weird
Impressive marketing spin on “our product and deployment strategies are wildly insecure.”
Remember when Scam Altman posted a picture of the Death Star to explain how scary GPT5 is? lmao these people are all such cretins and I hate them to the last.
Scam Altman
😆
