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#curl#security#maintainers#more#https#animations#saying#aisle#skilled#based
Discussion (26 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
"my experience from working with them on and off for many months now is nothing but good. Skilled, professional engineers without any bureaucracy. They know their stuff, and they've been very good at listening in and adjusting for our needs and wants."
Who am I? I'm Daniel, curl lead developer.
https://mastodon.social/@bagder/116807425534711479
(How do I post this messase then, well, my browser is faking a real user agent from some browser using a 'whatwg cartel' web engine)
Your self-made story sounds very interesting, you're a Bitcoin insider from 70s/80s Chicago with touch points to several families of really old money. Unfortunately your Wikipedia is deleted (or the page was never there and someone linked it anyways).
You seem to be financially secure with an interesting story to tell, why not spill the beans?
I'm poking the bear here and sincerely hope you are one of the truly self-made guys ;)
What stood out the most to me here was their pitch that harness currently matters most, over and above a specific model capacity. That’s one of my conclusions reading cloudflare’s Mythos debrief as well — the work right now that’s most valuable is in getting the models to loop effectively on tasks - so it’s super interesting to read the same perspective from a clearly effective org.
Paraphrasing: "The world's top security researches and AI labs are pouring all their VC money into finding as many security issues in curl as possible". At the same time, we know that curl is run by volunteers that needs to handle all of this. I'm not saying that we shouldn't do security review of open source libraries, just saying that this situation puts a lot of pressure on the maintainers.
The second unnerving thing is that many of the listed vulnerabilites target embedded libcurl; a library with a much slower update cycle. I'm guessing that many of the listed bugs are still in active use, inside the thousands of applications that use curl internally. Another tricky situation.
Both of these stand in contrast to the posts "braggy" style of "we found the most vulnerabilities of all!!!".
I am guessing the slower update cycle is an issue where it is statically linked?
This is true, and worth saying, but it is also a problem of the OSS philosophy. All software is used at your own risk, so if maintainers want their software used they need to keep up, and the (true) promise of "more eyeballs means more secure software" has this downside built in.
It's good that the world has thrown enormous resources into finding curl bugs, and found not very much. Most of the CVEs are low priority and in the more esoteric parts of curl. Some (like CVE-2026-9080) seem so obscure, I'm doubtful anyone other than the reporters have ever experienced it. That shows that curl was already pretty good to begin with.
This is ultimately a marketing piece for Aisle, but at least they did some public good to get their marketing.
The most important part is that these researchers were respectful of the maintainers, and spent their own time and money fully verifying their findings before raising them with the project. They have taken on board the message that the curl project won't even talk to slop flingers. The less diligent researchers, the Dunning-Krugerands who feel enabled by AI but actually just waste the maintainers time, are the real problem.
[0] https://youtu.be/t4wqREXVEAc
Based on the eye candy I imagine the team consists of a bunch of VC bros on their macbooks drinking chai lattes. Not sure if that is the impression you want to portray to a technical audience. The eye candy might work with nontechnical crowds though, so you do you.
Edit: To elaborate on the nontechnical macbook user angle: If the tagline is "outsmart your adversaries" I wonder how you plan to outsmart anyone if your security company is set up on backdoor-infested MacOS or Windows systems? You can't assume that the backdoors put in by USUK are not known to other foreign adversaries. Maybe I'm wrong and they are a Linux/BSD shop. In that case a report about running a security startup in a secure manner based on an open-source operating system would be a more interesting contribution than yet another CVE.