If you think vulnerability research simply doesn't matter, you have a lot of company in that opinion. It's something Bruce Schneier used to argue, and Marcus Ranum, and a bunch of other people that used be on closed secret vulnerability-sharing mailing lists before Bugtraq blew those cliques up. These are very old arguments.
But if you do think vulnerability research matters, and you're trying to argue that frontier models aren't a seismic change for that discipline, you have almost no company. Vulnerability researchers are overwhelmingly leaning on automation to find vulnerabilities and, just as importantly, generate the tooling required to test hypotheses.
You can feel about that however you want to feel about it. I mostly don't care, except: you can watch people like this being negatively polarized back into the bad old days of the mid-1990s, content-free CERT advisories, and vendor-controlled "responsible disclosure" by a use case that frontier models unimpeachably excel at.
It’s amazing how half the developers on earth live on a completely different planet now. There are plenty of new challenges, sure but we are far past the point where we can have a debate about “is it useful?”
And yet we continue to do so. I understand the feeling of loss some people may be facing. And there are definitely some really bad practices - like nakedly spewing claudspeak at your colleagues instead of communicating. Or raising a PR you don’t understand. There are asymmetries we haven’t learned to navigate. But we aren’t returning to a world where it doesn’t dominate our discipline so it’s best to find opportunities.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
But if you do think vulnerability research matters, and you're trying to argue that frontier models aren't a seismic change for that discipline, you have almost no company. Vulnerability researchers are overwhelmingly leaning on automation to find vulnerabilities and, just as importantly, generate the tooling required to test hypotheses.
You can feel about that however you want to feel about it. I mostly don't care, except: you can watch people like this being negatively polarized back into the bad old days of the mid-1990s, content-free CERT advisories, and vendor-controlled "responsible disclosure" by a use case that frontier models unimpeachably excel at.
jeremyjh · · focus · HN ↗
And yet we continue to do so. I understand the feeling of loss some people may be facing. And there are definitely some really bad practices - like nakedly spewing claudspeak at your colleagues instead of communicating. Or raising a PR you don’t understand. There are asymmetries we haven’t learned to navigate. But we aren’t returning to a world where it doesn’t dominate our discipline so it’s best to find opportunities.
bigstrat2003 · · focus · HN ↗
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