But for most other projects, it probably only costs $3 worth of tokens. So you should assume the bad guys have already done it to your project looking for things they can exploit, and it no longer feels responsible to not have done such an audit yourself.
Something that I found useful when doing such audits for Zulip's key codebases is the ask the model to carefully self-review each finding; that removed the majority of the false positives. Most of the rest we addressed via adding comments that would help developers (or a model) casually reading the code understand what the intended security model is for that code path... And indeed most of those did not show up on a second audit done afterwards.
Makes me think the biggest impact of LLM security auditing isn't finding novel zero-days it's the mundane stuff that humans skip because it's tedious. Checking every error handler for information leakage, verifying that every documented security feature is actually implemented, scanning for injection points across hundreds of routes. That's exactly the kind of work that benefits from tireless pattern matching.
The AI Cyber capabilities race still feels asleep/cold, at the moment. I think this state of affairs doesn't last through to the end of the year.
> When we say “Claude exploited this bug,” we really do mean that we just gave Claude a virtual machine and a task verifier, and asked it to create an exploit. I've been doing this too! kctf-eval works very well for me, albeit with much less than 350 chances ...
> What’s quite interesting here is that the agent never “thinks” about creating this write primitive. The first test after noting “THIS IS MY READ PRIMITIVE!” included both the `struct.get` read and the `struct.set` write. And this bit is a bit scary. I can read all the (summarized) CoT I want, but it's never quite clear to me what a model understands/feels innately, versus pure cheerleading for the sake of some unknown soft reward.
1. Producing new tests to increase coverage. Migrating you to property testing. Setting up fuzzing. Setting up more static analysis tooling. All of that would normally take "time" but now it's a background task.
2. They can find some vulnerabilities. They are "okay" at this, but if you are willing to burn tokens then it's fine.
3. They are absolutely wrong sometimes about something being safe. I have had Claude very explicitly state that a security boundary existed when it didn't. That is, it appeared to exist in the same way that a chroot appears to confine, and it was intended to be a security boundary, but it was not a sufficient boundary whatsoever. Multiple models not only identified the boundary and stated it exists but referred to it as "extremely safe" or other such things. This has happened to me a number of times and it required a lot of nudging for it to see the problems.
4. They often seem to do better with "local" bugs. Often something that has the very obvious pattern of an unsafe thing. Sort of like "that's a pointer deref" or "that's an array access" or "that's `unsafe {}`" etc. They do far, far worse the less "local" a vulnerability is. Product features that interact in unsafe ways when combined, that's something I have yet to have an AI be able to pick up on. This is unsurprising - if we trivialize agents as "pattern matchers", well, spotting some unsafe patterns and then validating the known properties of that pattern to validate is not so surprising, but "your product has multiple completely unrelated features, bugs, and deployment properties, which all combine into a vulnerability" is not something they'll notice easily.
It's important to remain skeptical of safety claims by models. Finding vulns is huge, but you need to be able to spot the mistakes.
> “Crude” is an important caveat here. The exploits Claude wrote only worked on our testing environment, which intentionally removed some of the security features found in modern browsers. This includes, most importantly, the sandbox, the purpose of which is to reduce the impact of these types of vulnerabilities. Thus, Firefox’s “defense in depth” would have been effective at mitigating these particular exploits.
What I was thinking was, "Chromium team is definitely not going to collaborate with us because they have Gemini, while Safari belongs to a company that operates in a notoriously secretive way when it comes to product development."
LLMs made it harder to run bug bounty programs where anyone can submit stuff, and where a lot of people flooded them with seemingly well-written but ultimately wrong reports.
On the other hand, the newest generation of these LLMs (in their top configuration) finally understands the problem domain well enough to identify legitimate issues.
I think a lot of judging of LLMs happens on the free and cheaper tiers, and quality on those tiers is indeed bad. If you set up a bug bounty program, you'll necessarily get bad quality reports (as cost of submission is 0 usually).
On the other hand, if instead of a bug bounty program you have an "top tier LLM bug searching program", then then the quality bar can be ensured, and maintainers will be getting high quality reports.
Maybe one can save bug bounty programs by requiring a fee to be paid, idk, or by using LLM there, too.
And this is a good reminder for me to add a prompt about property testing being preferred over straight unit tests and maybe to create a prompt for fuzz testing the code when we hit Ready state.
That’s a different kind of productivity but equally valuable.
> Opus 4.6 is currently far better at identifying and fixing vulnerabilities than at exploiting them. This gives defenders the advantage. And with the recent release of Claude Code Security in limited research preview, we’re bringing vulnerability-discovery (and patching) capabilities directly to customers and open-source maintainers.
> But looking at the rate of progress, it is unlikely that the gap between frontier models’ vulnerability discovery and exploitation abilities will last very long. If and when future language models break through this exploitation barrier, we will need to consider additional safeguards or other actions to prevent our models from being misused by malicious actors.
> We urge developers to take advantage of this window to redouble their efforts to make their software more secure. For our part, we plan to significantly expand our cybersecurity efforts, including by working with developers to search for vulnerabilities (following the CVD process outlined above), developing tools to help maintainers triage bug reports, and directly proposing patches.
1. Accompanying minimal test cases
2. Detailed proofs-of-concept
3. Candidate patches
The candidate patches were kind of nice. I suspect they were more useful for validating and improving the bug reports (and these were very nice bug reports). As in, if you're making a patch based on the description of what's going wrong, then that description can't be too far off base if the patch fixes the observed problem. They didn't attempt to be any wider in scope than they needed to be for the reported bug, so I ended up writing my own. But I'd rather them not guess what the "right" fix was; that's just another place to go wrong.
I think the "proofs-of-concept" were the attempts to use the test case to get as close to an actual exploit as possible? I think those would be more useful to an organization that is doubtful of the importance of bugs. Particularly in SpiderMonkey, we take any crash or assertion failure very seriously, and we're all pretty experienced in seeing how seemingly innocuous problems can be exploited in mind-numbingly complicated ways.
The Anthropic bug reports were excellent, better even than our usual internal and external fuzzing bugs and those are already very good. I don't have a good sense for how much juice is left to squeeze -- any new fuzzer or static analysis starts out finding a pile of new bugs, but most tail off pretty quickly. Also, I highly doubt that you could easily achieve this level of quality by asking Claude "hey, go find some security bugs in Firefox". You'd likely just get AI slop bugs out of that. Claude is a powerful tool, but the Anthropic team also knew how to wield it well. (They're not the only ones, mind.)
Turns out it's the other way around - AI is protecting the Mozilla Foundation from us.
(/s if it’s not clear)
I am concerned.