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51% Positive

Analyzed from 3542 words in the discussion.

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#security#don#someone#something#more#better#repo#source#through#bad

Discussion (118 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Retr0id•about 2 hours ago
I took a look at the Ghidra ones (because I use Ghidra), and I'm unimpressed: https://github.com/bikini/exploitarium/blob/main/ghidra-12.1...

The first requires being able to overwrite binaries in the Swift tool directory. Yes, if you overwrite binaries executed by ghidra, you can trigger code execution. This is not a surprise.

The second, idk, I'm not familiar with TraceRMI (but it's probably worth noting that "RMI" stands for Remote Method Invocation).

The third is not a vulnerability in the slightest, they just demonstrate that native 7zip parsing code is reachable. Maybe there is a bug in the 7zip parser, but without that it's meaningless.

ofjcihen•28 minutes ago
Was just thinking it would be hilarious if these were all known CVEs hiding the next Shai-Hulud inside of them and waiting to compromise security hobbyists rushing to download them.
Retr0id•23 minutes ago
It wouldn't be the first time!
woodruffw•about 1 hour ago
The Gitea one looks marginally interesting, but is probably not exploitable in practice (unless Gitea or whoever else isn’t properly isolating jobs on dedicated VMs). I suspect GitHub Actions has similar behavior and is not considered exploitable because the user is assumed to already have local, non-namespaced root access.
ryukoposting•about 1 hour ago
I'm no expert on any of these programs, but that's kinda the problem, isn't it? No single person is an expert on every codebase supposedly exploited in this repo.

After a bit of research, the Firefox one seems plausible to me. But, I haven't actually tried the POC. The explanation about the private-data and untrusted-input flags is plausible but I'm not an expert on Firefox's internals, maybe that's not actually how it works.

This just sucks, all around. Are we going to need every open source project gawking at the same repo full of stuff that has nothing to do with them, on the off chance that someone discloses a vuln that does have to do with them? Is this some kind of performative complaint about high friction in responsible disclosure? Well great job dickhead, you've just made a system that's even worse. Nobody benefits from this. Yuck yuck yuck.

trinari•about 1 hour ago
I actually prefer them being public than in some governments or corporations toolbox
DANmode•11 minutes ago
> Nobody benefits from this

Disclosures always enable more secure software to theoretically exist,

even if nobody follows through creating it.

They often do.

andrepd•about 1 hour ago
> Yes, if you overwrite binaries executed by ghidra, you can trigger code execution.

> but it's probably worth noting that "RMI" stands for Remote Method Invocation

This reminds me of someone submitting a (clearly vibecoded) vulnerability report claiming to have found a way to execute arbitrary SQL. The project in question? An SQL server... https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso/pull/4322

skerit•about 1 hour ago
I immediately saw the Ghidra one and was thinking: huh?
firefax•about 1 hour ago
The bigger takeaway is someone that smart is pissed off and dropping their shit with zero warning... but hey, that's just like, my opinion man.
Retr0id•about 1 hour ago
You don't need to be pissed off to decide that immediate public disclosure is the best option.
firefax•44 minutes ago
Ok, I don't know their emotional state. Fair point.

Maybe I'm projecting my own biases ;-)

dvt•11 minutes ago
Went over a few of these with a pretty keen eye, and they aren't that particularly interesting. The Docker one is just a weird bug, it's not a vulnerability, and certainly not a "0-day" (which is a pretty loaded term and people expect bad stuff to happen).

The nghttp2 nghttpx one is more interesting, and could potentially be used for phishing, but it's very hard to line up properly because the request queue is non-deterministic so basically impossible to target a specific victim (assuming proxy traffic).

The VLC one is just a straight-up crash/bug. And VLC crashes all the time when using weird codecs, so that's nothing new.

Am I missing something here?

doe88•about 2 hours ago
0-days-vibes-vulns? There should be a new category, for spotting and handling the em-dashes of this brave new world of vulns and making the old fossils like me only picking my head up for the old painfully still hand-crafted artisanal ones instead. A kind of label, like free-range for eggs, in sum.
tyre•about 1 hour ago
Yes, big pet peeve of the new world. Every em dash is apparently an AI trigger. Back in my day, they were a sign of great respect within my people.
rogerrogerr•about 1 hour ago
I used to be an em-dash user, but now my opinion is that I’d rather be perceived as someone who does not want to be confused with an LLM. So I’ve changed my writing style.
jackp96•28 minutes ago
They're just so handy! I do think LLMs tend to use them in a specific way, though.

So maybe tweaking your usage (ex. no spaces around them) or using a technically incorrect en-dash might offer the desired effect while subtly signaling that your message isn't AI-generated.

I still use them — mostly for pauses — but I'd like to think my voice sounds distinct enough from an AI that people can tell.

VectorLock•11 minutes ago
Code switching in the post LLM era.
sva_•29 minutes ago
I propose that humans use Unicode U+2E3B three em dash ⸻ it is an impressively long character.
nativeit•9 minutes ago
I still use them frequently. On iOS you just tap the hyphen twice, and it inserts an em dash—sorta like that.
Barbing•about 1 hour ago
I might like to see a collection of pre-2022 em-dash usage—a subset I suppose of the Low Background Steel category (https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai).
Dumblydorr•27 minutes ago
It’s so they don’t train on AI data, right?
sureMan6•about 1 hour ago
You completely misunderstanding the comment feels like an AI trigger
Tiberium•about 2 hours ago
Are they all actually 0-day? I think a lot of them are from disclosed CVEs/code that were already fixed upstream. It often seems like the term "0-day" has lost most of its meaning today and people often use it to refer to any exploits.
tempest_•about 2 hours ago
Repo claims

> A single archive of public exploit PoCs and vulnerability research writeups. At the time I post these, none have been reported. Feel free to report them yourself and take credit for the CVE if handed out lulz. Please do not abuse these. I do this so to allure people into the field, and I've always found this is the most efficient way.

Which is roughly the definition of zero day. Whether the contents of the repo reflect the above claim is something else entirely.

tyre•about 1 hour ago
> Please do not abuse these.

Reminds me of Jamie Wolf's joke about bestiality laws. Who are those for? What stops most people from bestiality is… not wanting to have sex with animals! For people who do want to, what, they won't because of… the law??

Who will this comment stop??

GTP•about 1 hour ago
Well, it's a joke because the problem becomes apparent after you think a bit about it. The exact same reasonig can be applied to anything illegal, criminals are criminals because they don't respect the law, so you could try to say that laws are useless. Reality is, if something is illegal not only someone can be punished after the fact, but in some cases also preventive measures can be taken.

Regarding the comment, it isn't going to stop anyone. Most people will not do cybercrime because they're honest. Of the remaining, the risk of being sentenced to jail time will instead stop some people, even if not all of them.

BoxFour•about 1 hour ago
Those seem like two different scenarios though, right?

The point of beastiality laws are to give society some recourse to punish people who abuse animals.

There was a very famous case back in Washington state back in the early 2000s where a group of men were sexually abusing horses. It was uncovered because one of them died, and the other could only be charged with trespassing because it wasn't illegal at the time to sexually abuse animals.

jldl805•about 1 hour ago
The laws are to punish the act once discovered. Not to inhibit it, primarily. Which I suppose cuts down on the incidence of the act in the long run,
utopiah•about 1 hour ago
If it stops even just 1 person once, isn't it already worth it?
seanclayton•about 1 hour ago
> Who are those for?

The people who want to see the people doing bestiality punished

nostrademons•about 1 hour ago
The jury, maybe.
PKop•about 1 hour ago
Either the fear of the consequences of breaking the law, or that the most effective way to reduce crime is to remove criminals from the population so over time these people being in jail or worse decreases the crime rate. They don't have to care about breaking laws in the abstract for the law, properly enforced, to reduce crime.
pooploop64•30 minutes ago
RCE has no meaning either in these situations. The "remote" part is usually an ssh root session if it means anything at all.
drob518•about 2 hours ago
There is going to be a flurry of this sort of stuff as the AIs get smart enough to find them. It will naturally die down as the legitimate ones are fixed. Yes, there will always be some level of this, but I’d expect it to be low and the exploits found to be increasingly complex. This is a time of transition.
utopiah•about 1 hour ago
> a flurry of this sort of stuff as the AIs get smart enough to find them.

I really think this characterization is misleading. It's not "getting smart", only more tailored toward a specific usage, better curated dataset, better harness, better prompts, better labeling of results, documentation of failures and success, etc.

The outcome is (hopefully) overall better but this anthropomorphized wording makes it sound like AI itself is somehow changing or evolving. No, both academia doing fundamental research, industry making it available commercially, and finally security researchers making the entire tooling and process packaged as a service are actively shaping it to make it better. There is no "it".

handoflixue•about 1 hour ago
Do you have a definition of "smart" such that there is something an AI could do to prove itself intelligent?

Or are you just defining "fast" as something only horses can do, and considering that a useful insight about cars?

slopinthebag•27 minutes ago
A future AI may be intelligent, but LLMs are clearly not. They have no agency, no ability to reason, and no world model. The most effective way to use them is to treat them as next token prediction machines, because that’s what they are.
drob518•about 1 hour ago
Yes, of course. I’m definitely anthropomorphizing as a shorthand. I’m the first one to say that these models are just a lot of matrix math.
jMyles•about 1 hour ago
> It will naturally die down as the legitimate ones are fixed.

Seems like we're already in the middle of this phase, but rather than dying down, the 'reports' have just gotten more noisy and obtuse, making it more difficult to establish the actual degree of threat / attack vector.

justacrow•about 1 hour ago
And if you are a state agency who'd like to keep the undisclosed zero-days you rely on secret, spamming maintainers with reports makes sense.

As a bonus if you find any actual zero-days in your mass-generated ones you don't report it and get a new one to play with.

alwa•about 1 hour ago
I mean. Makes sense until adversary states start walking through the same doors you’re using. At which point you might regret that maintainers are too flooded to deal with it.

Assuming, of course, said state agency is operating under sufficiently strategic governance and management…

juleiie•21 minutes ago
Honestly execution complexity is over time becoming a lower and lower barrier too.
xlayn•32 minutes ago
I want to rush to git clone, but as things are, the odds are extremely high that this kind of things that are too good to be real are honeypots and something there will compromise your machine or make your llm start working for someone else...
GTP•27 minutes ago
Then, don't rush and take a few minutes to set up a virtual machine.
IncreasePosts•14 minutes ago
What about all the virtual machine zero days?
ok123456•about 1 hour ago
Pretty unimpressive as security vulnerabilities. It would be better to just say these are simple bugs for the most part.
unnouinceput•about 1 hour ago
all vulnerabilities are just bugs.
GTP•about 1 hour ago
Vulns are a subset of bugs. What the above commenter is saying, is that some bugs don't belong to this category.
stonogo•about 1 hour ago
But not the other way around, which makes them different.
bassiee•about 1 hour ago
I also have a library of bugs I found using Claude Opus 4.8 through the Customer Verification Program. Undisclosed, Atp I dont even know if they have been found by someone else. But just like this repo

Theres a bunch of very specific scenario DoS bugs, buffer over/ underflows, that will get caught by ASLR and whatnot

When I report serious ones, mostly the devs will respond with something like, yeah, thats how we designed it in a dangerous way, so that the layer above or below can solve the issues, and other footgun stuff.

merelydev•about 2 hours ago
Most of the exploits are for opensource/free software.

I don't know what methods where used to find these exploits but I am starting to think security through obscurity might not be a bad thing in this day and age, where someone can just let bots loose on your codebase.

serf•about 2 hours ago
llms are fantastic disassembly partners, they're quite good at labeling functions from various dissassemblers -- the net losses from losing the benefits of open source , imo , outweigh the protection afforded by hiding your source code in yet another layer that is more and more easily unrolled through automated procedures.
blensor•about 2 hours ago
And isn't it also mostly a transitioning issue. Those open codebases will be constantly scanned for potential security issues and getting more and more hardened. There are probably a lot of easy wins that are going to be discovered over the next few years but it should taper out after a while.
merelydev•about 2 hours ago
Fair point but it assumes we all have access to LLMs with the same capabilities.
spongebobstoes•about 2 hours ago
disassembly only applies to client side software

something like nginx could arguably be more secure if it was closed source

(I am a proponent of and contributor to open source)

gpm•about 2 hours ago
Only until a single server running nginx is hacked and the binary leaked though...
Hizonner•about 2 hours ago
Um, the nginx binary would have to be in the hands of hundreds of thousands of server operators. And the set of server operators is rich in the kind of person who would attack it. Not to mention the huge number of leaks you'd get.

Maybe if it's some server-side software that you only use yourself...

maxloh•about 2 hours ago
Open source is a good thing, but I don't think what you are proposing is accurate.

A different way to frame this would be that those bugs would never be surfaced or exploited if the software were proprietary.

derektank•about 2 hours ago
Presumably, one could let the bots loose on your own codebase first. The question is one of financing of course. If your end users are enterprises willing to pay for a support contract, they probably care enough about not getting hacked to endure the higher prices that would let you throw enough tokens at the problem. Other open-source projects might have a harder time.
grayhatter•about 1 hour ago
> I don't know what methods where used to find these exploits but I am starting to think security through obscurity might not be a bad thing in this day and age, where someone can just let bots loose on your codebase.

I'd love to hear why you think obscurity is bad, if you now think maybe it's good in the LLM age?

I'd also be interested if you could describe exactly what or how you think security through obscurity works, or doesn't?

I've been thinking a lot about how to better teach this concept, so I'm looking to understand exactly how everyone thinks/understands how it currently works, or should work, or what it should do. I don't care about the "correct" answer, (I have ddg too :P) I'm interested in general expectations from SWE's that I might teach at work, instead of opinions of security eng speaking about theory.

GTP•35 minutes ago
Security through obscurity can make something a bit more secure in practice by annoying an attacker IF AND ONLY IF you're not relying on the hidden information remaining secret in order to the system remaining secure. E.g., if you're using a broken cipher and assume this is ok because no one knows which cipher you're using, you're gonna have a bad time.

In the case of FOSS software, it is generally recognized that the small advantage of keeping the source secret is far outweighted by the contributions and vuln reports you get if you publish the source.

merelydev•about 1 hour ago
"one ought to design systems under the assumption that the enemy will immediately gain full familiarity with them" - Claude Shannon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle

grayhatter•41 minutes ago
If you believe this, then why did you say?

> starting to think security through obscurity might not be a bad thing

kodareef5•about 2 hours ago
trying something new? this is interesting. the problem is that submitting reports is too slow. if you find one then your not supposed to share. but then over the next 90 days you learn no one cares and 13 other people submitted it before you, 43 after. maybe better that we just know. so we can run code we can trust sooner. zero is the proper number of dependencies. otherwise assume its broken.
jdw64•about 2 hours ago
I'm going through each one, and it's fascinating to see things like this. The UAF principle in c-ares is really interesting.

The problem ultimately came from not being able to prevent stale pointers. The attack works by figuring out the size of the stale pointer, then spraying memory with data of the same size, and finally achieving RCE (Remote Code Execution). How do people even come up with ideas like this?

jdw64•about 2 hours ago
But do people actually find these vulnerabilities on their own, or are they using LLMs? I was curious about how these vulnerabilities work, so I tried asking my dear friend Mr. CLAUDE, but he immediately threw an error and ended the session because it was a cybersecurity question. Enterprise APIs block even the analysis itself, so it's amazing that people can actually pull this off in practice.
nicce•about 1 hour ago
People have always used tools. Some people have better tools than others. I guess the line is thin whether they found on their own or not.
raesene9•about 1 hour ago
If you want to chat with Claude about this, I'd recommend using Opus 4.6. IME it's happy to talk about (and even write) PoC exploits
lacoolj•about 2 hours ago
I imagine this is a large open model like GLM5.2 etc
jeffbee•about 2 hours ago
le sigh, c-ares. Very predictable outcome. If you ever find yourself entertaining the idea that you will simply write non-blocking network protocol stacks in C with manual lifetime management, slap yourself. It doesn't matter if you think you are a super genius of unimpeachable taste. The job is impossible.
jdw64•about 2 hours ago
Thank goodness I use a GC language
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mrbluecoat•about 2 hours ago
A surprising amount of documentation if the actor was just LLM-dropping these..
Retr0id•about 2 hours ago
Why is that surprising? LLMs can churn out arbitrary volumes of "documentation" in an instant.
dawnerd•about 2 hours ago
That seems trivial for an llm to provide.
hypercain•about 1 hour ago
Mythos has been achieved internally
functionmouse•about 3 hours ago
we have got to stop putting our bank accounts and SSNs on computers
ryandrake•about 2 hours ago
We need our infrastructure to stop treating bank account numbers and social security numbers as secrets. At least in the US, bank account numbers appear on physical checks and are required to be shared in order to do an ACH transfer, and a social security number is not supposed to be used as an identifier (unless to the Social Security Administration itself) or as a secret password.

Ideally, nothing nefarious should happen if both of them were listed and queryable publicly.

silversmith•about 1 hour ago
Hang on, can you actually do something nefarious with just the bank account number?
ryandrake•about 1 hour ago
If someone has your bank account and bank’s routing number (which is also not secret), they can make fraudulent ACH transfers and payments from your account. Of course it will most likely be caught as fraud some time after the fact, but just those two bits of not-secret info are enough to grief someone.
mystifyingpoi•11 minutes ago
AFAIK that's US thing. In normal countries bank account numbers are not a secret. The worst thing that can happen is someone sending you money.
derektank•about 2 hours ago
It’s quite ridiculous that we haven’t been able to build a modern identification system capable of replacing SSNs in the last 30 years.
DANmode•7 minutes ago
You can buy your SSN for $6-$10.
dgellow•about 1 hour ago
You all need a better system than US SSNs
pixel_popping•about 1 hour ago
Firewalled VM, locked-in keyboard/mouse, 1 query to any agent and it's setup.
gnerd00•about 2 hours ago
... support cash, tell your neighbors
Cider9986•about 2 hours ago
And Monero for online.
JohnMakin•about 2 hours ago
til you get debanked
krapp•about 2 hours ago
Cash doesn't require a bank.
tliltocatl•about 2 hours ago
A friendly reminder that a 0-day is a vulnerability that wasn't known until after a malicious actor exploited it. If someone publishes a PoC, it is not a 0-day, just a vulnerability.
Retr0id•about 2 hours ago
No, the days start counting from the availability of a patch.
rmast•about 1 hour ago
I was thinking that the other definition was right and this correction was wrong.

Then I did some searching and found multiple examples of both definitions in use, making things murky.

So I turned to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary: “ of, relating to, or being a vulnerability (as in a computer or computer system) that is discovered and exploited (as by cybercriminals) before it is known to or addressed by the maker or vendor”

And of course they use an “or” to make it ambiguous as to whether the days start counting when the vulnerability becomes known, or when the vendor has addressed it.

0123456789ABCDE•about 1 hour ago
what if a path is never released?
richbell•about 1 hour ago
I've only heard it used as Retr0id's definition.
jmward01•about 1 hour ago
I think people may miss the point of a repo like this. Individually these are small puzzle pieces that can't do anything. Put them all in one place and it becomes easier to pick up pieces and try them together to see if they fit and build something bigger. Get enough pieces to fit together and you actually have something. This is the 'FOUO' idea in security. Enough open information gathered together in one place crosses the boundary from 'just public info' to 'secret stuff here!'. Now we have automatic puzzle solvers (coding assistants) a repo like this becomes a lot more meaningful.
esikich•about 1 hour ago
Yep and typically none of this is meaningful unless you have no security practices at all. You can't have it both ways. Every security team says these things are all critical even though, for example, it's only being used internally. Cool, so you somehow have our network cert, are on site physically, have compromised a laptop fully without all of our tools detecting weird shit, have a password, admin access to the repo, somehow are spoofing MFA, etc etc. Yeah it all adds up, but as an admin I'm just fucking done dropping everything for these kinds of things.
johnwheeler•about 2 hours ago
That's one way to do it.
grayhatter•about 1 hour ago
> At the time I post these, none have been reported. Feel free to report them yourself and take credit for the CVE if handed out lulz. I do this so to allure people into the field, and I've always found this is the most efficient way.

I've been a skiddy, he would have believed this. Thankfully, I've grown a bit, and can see this for the transparent, "I'm angry and want to hurt others so I don't feel alone", it actually is.

I'm sorry you're so angry dude (me too), but as someone who's joined the blue side, we'd appreciate it if you gave us some kind of heads up, the bad guys generally have a lot more time to scroll for new payloads than I do. Not all of us deserve the kindness of a heads up, but every single one of our users deserve it. Don't punish them because you're mad at someone else.

You can flex on the idiots you're trying to flex on, without hurting people. Even an email to security@[that_project_domain] saying "hey, I've published these" would move you from the group of people I see making the world worse, into the group making it better. (You don't have to, obviously, but making the whole world worse wont make you less angry.)

sellmesoap•5 minutes ago
User/admin discretion for software they use should be a big factor, sometimes getting burned is how you learn to play with fire. Or decide that having your data/participation disrespected means you need to set harder boundaries. My solution is to try things in isolation, run very few services, try to avoid becoming dependent on the online, appreciate the offline and local first.
voodooEntity•about 1 hour ago
While i can follow your path, maybe because i see the same, i sadly have seen in groups of friends how this can go sideways very fast. If you report things, some companies gone treat you as a criminal/offensive actor and even go legal actions against you even you just tellem here you got this vuln.

Sure you than can do it anonymous and so on but point is : its not like every actor that gets notified will react thankful to it. Some even just ignore it.

esikich•about 1 hour ago
How bad are your security practices that these tiny obscure things matter? None of these findings that show up here on HN should even make you flinch. The alarmist takes on this stuff is fucking exhausting and I'm tired of security teams bugging me about it. Do your job and this shit doesn't matter AT ALL.
grayhatter•21 minutes ago
I said "doesn't matter" to someone once... the resulting lesson came in the form of a reply from the whitehat researcher (waves, hi brian!) a 16step exploit chain resulting in a one click full account takeover.

I'm equally annoyed and over the alarmist takes. But I don't think it's fair to group mine into it. I'm annoyed at seeing discard respect for others into the same void everyone is happy to toss quality.

Do these tiny things matter? No, not to the default-panic-level everyone adopts when they see 0day, or CVE... but duh, I'm now just repeating exactly what you already said. That no, for the record is mostly because I don't use any of these, not just because they're boring exploits. While I always look, I default assume anything CVE is boring/pointless. But I still read them.

But then, I'm not trying to convince the owner of the repo. I'm trying to discourage the theme among researchers that "no one cares", because I have seen researchers disclose bugs publicly, that we'd be eager to pay out on, because they disagreed with the decision on their last report.

I've fixed bugs being actively exploited against our users, that was found/fixed only after a whitehat report for something adjacent (we pay on those btw, and you should too). I don't wanna live in the world where it's easier for the bad guys, the only way we get there is once "everyone knows", you gotta report the all bugs that you can turn into an exploit. I don't want "the whitehat researcher culture" to move towards, who cares' dump the PoC on github, screw anyone that could be hurt by the bad guys, they deserve to be punished for the incompetence of others. SWE's are shit at security, security researchers are shit at SWE, the only way we get the good outcome, is if they're willing (and encouraged) to work together.

DANmode•3 minutes ago
That’s a whole lot of “we” to not mention which company you’re at that supposedly plays well with security researchers/has a proper bug bounty.
ohadkr•about 2 hours ago
Open source is the best
jiug•about 1 hour ago
"Cibercrime is cringe"
haberdasher•about 2 hours ago
"cybercrime is cringe"
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segmondy•about 2 hours ago
What if this person is from an AI lab that really wants the govt to keep suppressing Mythos/Fable & GPT5.6? It's what I would do, the timing couldn't be any better.
0123456789ABCDE•about 1 hour ago
wouldn't it be trivial to match the repo to the user logs?