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On becoming a carpenter
by Dave Aitel 12 Jun '25

12 Jun '25

[image: image.png] Every so often I poke my head out, gopher-like, from the tunnels where I am furiously vibe-coding, or as it's going to be known a couple years from now, coding. I think it's probably true that coding used to be a high octane sport for concentration freaks as deep in the zone as a sperm whale hunting giant squid by listening to the faint echoes of pings off squishy bodies leagues away. But coding is now a juggling competition where the winners are over-caffeinated ADHD insectivorous bats tracking the results of five different queries into as many LLM-based coding systems and context switching, running tests, and re-querying at a rate that would drive most people bananas. In other words, to compete in this day and age you do have to know your LeetCode, but you have to do it in parallel, using Codex, or Windsurf, or Codex-CLI, or cutting and pasting bits of code into o1-pro, but all at once, choosing which LLM-assistant-coder depending on what exact kind of programming issue you're trying to solve. On one hand, these tools are very much junior engineers, and make simple mistakes, and on the other hand, collectively they are better than you will ever be and realizing that as soon as possible is a big advantage. I spent some time, while contemplating obscure and bespoke flavors of obsolescence, to listen to Halvar's most recent talk. Everyone should. It is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qllU_B_Rmis . [image: image.png] "Cyber-espionage does not easily translate into industrial capability, particularly in fast moving industries. You don't become a carpenter by stealing his invoices" - Halvar And of course not? But that's not what hackers do. As we learned from listening to Grugq's keynote <https://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2023hkt/speaker/the-grugq/> the most likely scenario is that hackers attack the carpentry problem as a system - use the invoices and outgoing quotes to drive all the business to yourself, along with stealing all their best people by offering them exactly 2X their salary. Going active sometimes means DoSing the supplier of some company so it misses a key deadline with its customer-base, which then moves to your more reliable, cheaper, product, built by their former head of engineering. And I firmly believe that few scientific and engineering problems are so hard that they can't be replicated given access to the right cyber team and all the resources a nuclear power can throw at them if they are a national priority. Half of the cyber policy world still thinks that cyber norms are a thing! We have labored for too long under the belief that we were going to be able to set the rules to the game in a new domain. But the rules are what they are. The terrain has no master. -dave

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Typey typey
by Dave Aitel 31 May '25

31 May '25

https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/feed/posts/daveaitel_for-the-offensive-info… <https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/feed/posts/daveaitel_for-the-offensive-info…> yRnO So I wanted to point this contracting gig out because I think it's a good opportunity for someone who can do quick vulnerability triage and either replicate or disprove that a vulnerability exists. Obviously you need to be very good at c and c++ and every other language to do this and have familiarity with vulnerability development....and also be located in the US , although you do not need a clearance. Dave

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Announcing the Parity Release of Volatility 3 and the Deprecation of Volatility 2
by Andrew Case 16 May '25

16 May '25

The Volatility Team is very excited to announce the official Parity Release of Volatility 3! This release is not only capable of fully replacing all of Volatility 2’s features, but it also incorporates support for all the latest operating system versions plus all the latest memory forensics research. With this release, Volatility 2 is now deprecated, and its GitHub project has been archived. Our announcement blog post details the new features, many of the new plugins, and tells you how to get started with Volatility 3. https://volatilityfoundation.org/announcing-the-official-parity-release-of-… Our team is incredibly grateful for the continued support from our community, and we hope that you all enjoy Volatility 3 for many years to come. -- The Volatility Team

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OpenAI Security Research
by Dave Aitel 29 Mar '25

29 Mar '25

So a few things: 1. https://openai.com/index/security-on-the-path-to-agi/ I feel like this blog is worth reading. :) 2. We're throwing a post-RSAC conference in SanFran to talk about AI and Security (in particular, securing cybery things with AI) and if I'm very lucky I'll even get to do a quick demo of the software I've been working on, not that it will surprise anyone on this list! We have a few tickets left I think and if you're interested and one of the people who should be attending I made you a form <https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe64yhyrTW7LYwY3qxOyOpaVqbrKgdZayq…> to fill out! Thanks, Dave Aitel

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Cyber Reasoning Systems
by Dave Aitel 09 Mar '25

09 Mar '25

I continue to believe there are a lot of interesting questions around building cyber reasoning systems for vuln finding. Even the very basics seem hard to study and understand, and the eval datasets available are....sparse or incomplete. For example, what you really want if you're analyzing git repos is the commit a bug was introduced, and the commit it was fixed. But usually you get "a commit where it maybe existed". Likewise, it's an open question what kind of tools you can provide an LLM in this space and how it can best use them. Anyways, if you're building a cyber reasoning system for finding bugs, please spam me an email. -dave

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on your child going to college in Christchurch, NZ and velvet worms
by Dave Aitel 11 Feb '25

11 Feb '25

*on your child going to college in Christchurch, NZ and velvet worms* By mid‑August the garden already practices absence — stems turning hollow, the robin leaving its notes hanging in the air like torn corners of a song. Under the chirp of palmetto bugs, a log eases itself back into earth. Inside, hidden from the light, a velvet worm does the impossible: offers herself to a spill of pale, blind threads. For days she is nothing but hunger turned outward, spinning glue not to hold but to feed, until their tiny jaws harden and, like rain, they slip back into moss, leaving her the damp and the slow work of being only herself again. It's a kind of mercy, this leaving — clean as the way geese carve open the sky, each V a blade that does not return. You pack your fragments — old Defcon badges, a frayed pentester lab shirt, dreams with edges I've never seen — into my old suitcase. On your dorm wall next to a shattered cathedral, you'll make a collage of faces, new maps where I am just blank space beyond the frame, like unexecuted shellcode left on the heap. The house darkens into its own bark. I wander its rooms like a soft thing without eyes, tasting the air for what I once held. There is a moment in every season when what clung must fall. Even the velvet worm stops spinning sweetness for a brood that has grown teeth, and the log swallows its secrets—the bacterial smell of old rain, the echo of digital footfalls we never learned how to trace.

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(the root of the root and the bud of the bud)
by Dave Aitel 14 Jan '25

14 Jan '25

Memories and thoughts are the same thing, someone tried to explain to me recently. You have to think to remember, in other words. This is hard to grasp for a lot of people because they *think *they have *memories*. They wrongly think memory is a noun instead of a verb, which is ok in philosophy and psychology but in cutting edge computer science we have to be precise about these sorts of things. Twenty-five years ago, when I first started writing fuzzers, a full quarter century, people thought it was an absolutely stupid thing to do. The smart people were using their giant brains to do static analysis. They were tainting and sinking. They were reading the code and finding flaws. They did threat models. They did not write glorified for loops that made different amounts of A's go into different RPC functions. But I had the hubris of a teenage hacker, and I thought it was fun. More fun, perhaps, than reading code. In 2025, fuzzing is part of the software development lifecycle for any organization rich enough to call a hyperscale datacenter home. It is a *sine qua non* for secure software. Fuzzing, we now understand, is *reasoning*. And if you can't reason over your code, you can't secure it. Part of the value is that fuzzing echoes machine learning in that it scales nicely with the amount of CPU you could use. And there's no false positives when you measure whether an input crashes a program - it either does or it does not. There are downsides of course - many inputs may cause the same crash. Fuzzing identifies a flaw exists, but it doesn't tell you what the flaw actually is. And fuzzing often finds enough flaws that development teams become overwhelmed with triage. And of course, fuzzing can often be too dumb to reach the important bugs, since it is exploring the space of possible inputs semi-randomly, even with coverage guided analysis. We (as a community) tried to correct these things with SMT solvers, or smarter fuzzers. But now we have a new tool: LLMs, which reason in a very different way. But still they *reason*. Admittedly, there are many disbelievers. "LLMs just repeat what they are trained on" and taken to an extreme that's true but that's also true for any of us. In practice, they reason perfectly well. And not too long from now, maybe a couple years at most, any organization that is not using them widely for security engineering is left behind the curve - the same way teams not using fuzzers are today. Memories and thoughts are, in essence, the same thing because both require the act of reasoning. In computer science, fuzzing and LLMs are tools that embody this principle. They don't passively store knowledge - they actively explore, test, and refine it. When I first started fuzzing, it was dismissed as a foolish endeavor because it didn’t look like traditional reasoning. Now, it’s indispensable. LLMs are on a similar path: misunderstood by some, but already reshaping how we approach security. Just as fuzzing forced us to rethink what reasoning over code looks like, LLMs are forcing us to rethink reasoning itself. In both cases, the act - not the object - is what matters. They are the root of the root and the bud of the bud - the foundation of what comes next. And if you don’t carry this forward, you risk being left behind in a world that’s growing beyond you. -dave

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Anthropological "Hacker" Map
by A K 13 Jan '25

13 Jan '25

Hi all, In the latest "Security Weekly" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXefYdEGW04 ) they present the Anthropological "Hacker" Map https://wherewarlocksstayuplate.com/map/ While the map is incomplete (how can it ever be complete?), I think it is one of the few times, outside of David Aitel's writings about the cross-cut between the "underground" (for a lack of a better term) and subsequent commercial activity. Based on my personal bubble, completely empirical evidence that you should take with a huge grain of salt the cross-cut is not the actual highlight here - the highlight is a temporal one. The generation of folks contained therein are the among the first two generations (or so) between the commoditization of Internet - essentially having first movers advantage on the space. Anyway, felt like sharing this with the rest of the community here

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the endless stream
by Dave Aitel 31 Dec '24

31 Dec '24

I've seen great people in our industry crushed under the weight of the secrets they carry into a singularity from which no information can emerge. In some ways the lesson from apache_nosejob.c <https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/21560> was that we cannot take ourselves seriously, that at the heart of our discipline there must remain a jester, that we must float upon the stream of endless information rather than absorb it into our darkened core. To that end I often listen to infosec podcasts while doing other things: 1. The Three Buddy Problem <https://securityconversations.com/podcast/security-conversations/> with Ryan Naraine, Costin Raiu and JAGs. This is probably my new favorite podcast, with an uncensored take on current infosec events, largely from an incident response standpoint, but in general covering all the bases and courageously offending everyone at great length. 2. Risky.Biz <https://risky.biz/RB775/>: Still excellent after all these years, partially because Adam is such an experienced penetration tester and Patrick is a good host, and I generally learn things about events that are poorly covered in the news from their perspective, without having to go through and do fact checking myself (aka, why the Struts bug is so bad, etc.) Also, happy New Year everyone! -dave

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Hacking the Edges of Knowledge: LLMs, Vulnerabilities, and the Quest for Understanding
by Dave Aitel 02 Nov '24

02 Nov '24

[image: image.png] It's impossible not to notice that we live in an age of technological wonders, stretching back to the primitive hominids who dared to ask "Why?" but also continually accelerating and pulling everything apart while it does, in the exact same manner as the Universe at large. It is why all the hackers you know are invested so heavily in Deep Learning right now, as if someone got on a megaphone at Chaos Communication Camp and said "ACHTUNG. DID YOU KNOW THAT YOU CAN CALCULATE UNIVERSAL TRUTHS BACKWARDS ACROSS A MATRIX USING BASIC CALCULUS. VIELEN DANK UND AUF WIEDERSEHEN!". Hackers are nothing if not obsessed with the theoretical edges of computation, the way a 1939 Niels Bohr was obsessed with the boundary between physics and philosophy, and how to push that line as far as possible using math in such a way that you could find complementary pairs of truths lying about everywhere and of course one aspect of his work is that you can almost a century later deter an adversary from attacking you by threatening to end the world, and another aspect is you can study the stars and as a bureaucrat you would call this "dual-use" although governments tend to have a heck of a lot of use for the former and almost no use at all for the latter. All of which is to say that while NO HAT <http://nohat.it> is a very good conference, with a lot of great talks, the one I have enjoyed the most so far is "LLMs FOR VULNERABILITY DISCOVERY: FINDING 0DAYS AT SCALE WITH A CLICK OF A BUTTON <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5LMRS3AF1k>" (by Marcello Salvati and Dan McInerney). This talk goes over their lessons learned developing VulnHunter <https://github.com/protectai/vulnhuntr>, which finds real vulns in Python apps given just the source directory, and those lessons are roughly as follows: 1. Focus on Specific Tasks and Structured Outputs: LLMs can be unreliable when given open-ended or overly broad tasks. To mitigate hallucinations and ensure accurate results, it's crucial to provide highly specific instructions and enforce structured outputs. (aka, the naive metrics people are providing are probably not useful). 2. Manage Context Windows Effectively: While larger context windows are beneficial, strategically feeding code to the LLM in smaller, relevant chunks, like focusing on the call chain from user input to output, is key to maximizing efficiency and accuracy. They did a great job here, and this is important even if you have a huge context window to play with (aka, Gemini). 3. Leverage Existing Libraries for Code Parsing: Dynamically typed languages like Python present unique challenges for static analysis. Utilizing libraries like Jedi, which is designed for Python autocompletion, can significantly streamline the process of identifying and retrieving relevant code segments for the LLM. They recommend a rewrite here themselves using treesitter to look at C/C++, although I would probably personally have used an IDE plugin to handle Python (and give you debugger access). 4. Prompt Engineering is Essential: The way you structure prompts has a huge impact on the LLM's performance. Clear instructions, well-defined tasks, and even the use of XML tags for clarity can make a significant difference in the LLM's ability to find vulnerabilities. But of course, in my experience, the better your LLM (larger really), the less prompt engineering matters. And when you are testing against multiple LLMs you don't want to introduce prompt engineering as a variable. 5. Bypass Identification and Multi-Step Vulnerability Analysis: LLMs can be remarkably effective at identifying security bypass techniques and understanding complex, multi-step vulnerabilities that traditional static code analyzers might miss. There's a ton of work to be done in future analysis in how this happens and what the boundaries are. 6. Avoid Over-Reliance on Fine-Tuning and RAG: While seemingly promising, fine-tuning LLMs on vulnerability datasets can lead to oversensitivity and an abundance of false positives. Similarly, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) may not be sufficiently precise for pinpointing the specific code snippets required for comprehensive analysis. Knowing that everyone is having problems with these techniques actually is good because it goes against the common understanding of how you would build something like this. At its core, vulnerability discovery is as much about understanding as it is about finding flaws. To find a vulnerability, one has to unravel the code, decipher its intent, and even the assumptions of its creator. This process mirrors the deeper question of what it means to truly understand code—of seeing beyond syntax and function to grasp the logic, intention, and potential points of failure embedded within. Like Bohr’s exploration of complementary truths in physics, understanding code vulnerabilities requires seeing both what the code does and what it could do under different conditions. In this way, the act of discovering vulnerabilities is itself a study in comprehension, one that goes beyond detection to touch on the very nature of insight. -dave

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