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Greg Kroah-Hartman – Security in the LLM Age [video]

337 points · 128 comments · usernomdeguerre

  1. usernomdeguerre · · focus · HN ↗
    Greatly appreciated the candor. I've included a few slides into text that i thought were eye-opening to me:

    From his Kernel Recipes 2026 slide on Mythos

    ```

      Mythos's 79 vulnerabilities:
      24 - no detail at all "something crashed"
      14 - not a bug at all
      3 - totally made up data
      15 - already fixed in latest release
        - 11 by others
        - 4 by anthropic
      20 - fixes were needed
        - 7 "assume a malicious filesystem image"
        - 2 "assume you can inject a malicious network packet into the middle of the stack"
        - 2 "NOMMU"
        - 6 sctp networking issues for untrusted devices
        - 2 ipv6 minor network issues 
        - 1 gpu driver for local malicious user
    
    ```

    GHK called this "10 'real' bugfixes", which to me sounds like there's a wild hype machine around these companies and uncritical parroting of every press release they make that falls apart when you engage the affected real experts.

    1. OtherShrezzing · · focus · HN ↗
      We’ve seen this in a few open source repos we voluntarily manage security on. They’re not massive repos, but big enough they get attention from security researchers.

      Most of the real low hanging fruit was picked up by humans years ago. When doing automated scanning, the majority of stuff is overly-verbose nonsense which takes hours of expert human labour to understand, test, and discard.

      Reading through a Claude generated false positive is absolutely excruciating, because it is absolutely determined that what it’s found is justified. Often you’ll receive very long accompanying “proof of concept” code which demonstrates absolutely wild scenarios. It’s especially frustrating when you’re volunteering your time for a project, and a well-meaning contributor submits the report without the technical nous to understand why you’re rejecting it.

      1. b112 · · focus · HN ↗
        Right now, all top tier LLMs are as eager, bright 20ish year old interns.

        Very gung ho, full of energy, loads of book learning, no real world experience or understanding of why things are as they are.

        Leave them to their own devices at your peril. Trust nothing they do.

        Yet directly guide them, monitor everything they do, some value emerges.

        1. truncate · · focus · HN ↗
          I wish people stopped equating LLM to interns or junior engineers. They are tools, and as good they may be at some specific things people do, they also really suck at many more which we wouldn’t find acceptable in humans.
          1. darkwater · · focus · HN ↗
            Indeed they are tools. But if people/companies treat them as tools that can take a problem a human used to solve, and make them solve it from start to end, then the comparison begins to be necessary.
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