7 ms·

Welcome to the Strip Mining Era of OSS Security

132 points by salsakran 4mo ago

marginalx 4mo ago
Clearly for commercial oriented opensource software, security through obscurity is one way to keep the pace in the short term. Not an option for proper open source software. Will this be the case that people who use open source software that is easily detectable will also start to shy away from using them for the fear of zero-days? One of the benefits of Open source has been that there are more eye balls on the source, leading to more secure code/better quality. I think given enough time the bug reports will plateau and we will be back to a normal cadence - once the tsunami is over, hopefully things will settle at a more manageable cadence .
- dynawicki 4mo ago
  This benefit you speak of is actually just a meme. Source that is unmaintained is dead. Nobody is looking at it, even the maintainer has something better to do. Do you know whats even more powerful than "eyeballs"? Money.
- salsakran 4mo ago
  I'm not sure that the benefit of many eyes helps here. So much of this bulk scanning is low-effort, and if you're a smart person developing closed source software you get the benefits of bulk scanning, but _at the time of your choosing_ . OSS has always had tradeoffs and I sadly think this one is going straight to the "Cons" column. We still think the Pros outweigh the Cons, but this is NotGreat.
- Joel_Mckay 4mo ago
  Lets be honest, LLM with fuzzers are going to pound any llvm generated binary right in the hubris. Won't matter if is closed source, signed, and or obfuscated. =3
  - zephen 4mo ago
    Don't think you even need to qualify that with "llvm generated."
    - Joel_Mckay 4mo ago
      Nondeterministic compiled code-motion in llvm means a workaround can't reliably be patched given version permuted bug emergence. Fun times =3
      - zephen 4mo ago
        It's certainly possible to write optimizations that generate nondeterministic llvm outputs, but the docs explain conditions when that can happen, and warn against it.
dynawicki 4mo ago
Good luck getting anyone who values their time to even triage the results. I would rather lick the bottom of a NYC dumpster that a rat had just died in.
- salsakran 4mo ago
  That was true last year -- things changes. Ignore (admittedly low-effort LLM generated) reports at your own peril.
  - dynawicki 4mo ago
    Software will eventually become "unmaintainable due to lack of interest", because of this very thing. People not invested in this are not "in peril" in any way.
    - bluGill 4mo ago
      A lot of people are invested without realizing it. I'm typing this on a computer running linux, with all the standard services/software. I maintain one OSS project (icecc - we have always said only run on trusted networks. I'm sure there are a lot of issues in our code but nobody has bothered run a scan yet to my knowledge), but I don't pay attention to everything. I'm sure there are known easy to exploit (with a LLM) issues on this computer just because my distro hasn't updated yet. (I need a better distro, but even the most up to date will constantly have these issues)
      - dynawicki 4mo ago
        What you just described may be accurate. But it also is the essence of a "trap". My comment about investment was more to that point. If software "is a trap", even my ever-computing loving wrote first programs on an Apple II in the 80s will only be as you sort of describe invested in by reference (minimal usage). But no-one will sign up for a "trap" as a career, and only those who do will deal with its problems. The first thing that comes to mind is "Johns", "Hotels", and the trappings of the sex trade.
gmuslera 4mo ago
The problem on the side of closed source software is that if there had been leaks of source code, the vulnerabilities and exploits may remain unknown for long time.
- pixl97 4mo ago
  I would go to say that most closed source software code gets leaked. Most companies hold that info close and don't disclose it, even if legally required unless it's made public.
aetherspawn 4mo ago
Say I had $1000, how do I get the best value for money to discover vulnerabilities? Are there any worthwhile LLM powered services that are turnkey and ready to go?
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- ben_w 4mo ago
  From what I've heard, every LLM before Mythos (which you can't get, they'll call you if you're big enough) will have far too many false positives to be helpful, so I guess the best option would be to use an agent to help you (not lights-off vibe coding!*) take advantage of all the older tools like valgrind and closing all the compiler warnings? * I presume I'm not the only one to find the agents tasked with adding unit tests will sometimes try to sneak through "open source code and apply regex to confirm presence or absence of specific string literal". They can speed you up significantly, but you absolutely do need to pay attention to what they produce.
  - salsakran 4mo ago
    With all respect to the Anthropic folks, that's just marketing. (If they're reading this: let us into the program so I can be proven wrong here.) I'm sure what they have is awesome, but it's clear that there are people out there with some decent prompts that are getting results out of widely available models as well. The big thing we're sharing is: bulk scanning by random people in random geographies got a _lot_ better around January, it's widely distributed, and it's going to get a lot better regardless of whether that specific version of Mythos becomes widely available or not.
    - embedding-shape 4mo ago
      > prompts that are getting results out of widely available models as well. Absolutely, and the "false-positive" issue people keep citing as why Mythos is so good is easily solved in the harness, simplest solution is starting fresh context with another prompt to evaluate if it's a false-positive or not, just adding that drastically cuts down the rate.
adamtaylor_13 4mo ago
> Did you have other plans for the weekend? Or a long term project you’re prioritizing? That’s nice, you have a new plan — fix every vulnerability that comes in NOW. Umm... no? It's called OPEN source. Expecting people to cancel their plans to make your free software more secure is pretty audacious. Luckily, many WILL, but the expectation is just foolish.
- salsakran 4mo ago
  That line was aimed at other OSS maintainers. These alerts are absolutely not being shared publicly before we have a fix for them.
  - orthoxerox 4mo ago
    Sorry for all caps, but for some reasons OSS licenses think this is the proper way to style this paragraph MIT: THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. BSD: THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS “AS IS” AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. OSS maintainers don't owe anyone shit. Anyone who thinks fixing the bug is important is free to fix it and submit a patch.
salsakran 4mo ago
Side conversation -- This is all stuff we're seeing in white/grey hat land. What's going on in blackhat land?
- bluGill 4mo ago
  Nobody really knows of course. However it is safe to assume they are not so stupid as to ignore what is happening in the other areas (at least some of them), and so they are running their own targeted scans and then trying to figure out how to make money (or whatever their goal is) by exploiting them. They are also using LLMs to try things on closed source that are more than a brute force attack, though I have no idea what those would be.
as3qkaH 4mo ago
Apparently the AI company Metabase has a very poor code base. Like so many others, instead of questioning their own (or AI) output, they help their AI overlords by promoting security scans. Fact is that Mythos found only one issue in curl and nothing at all in most code bases. It is getting quiet around Mythos, and the AI companies will move on to the next scam.
- bluGill 4mo ago
  Mythos found only one issue in curl - but it didn't start until many other LLMs had been run and found a lot of issues that were fixed. If Mythos was run a year ago it would have found over 100 issues (of course it didn't exist a year ago, nor did the other tools).
  - 4ladf1 4mo ago
    Curl had many old protocols and code from the 1990s that no one used. Besides, Mythos was claimed to be better than existing tools. In most open source projects, Mythos or similar tools have found nothing. The AI people only contact the projects where they find something, because it would be bad for marketing otherwise.
    - dynawicki 4mo ago
      This is now the open source problem. And why my personal opus of work has been removed from online repositories. Who gave them "the right to scan"? You did by hosting your open source in public. But scanning a public service prior to AI was still covered by "Unauthorized System Access". But what if they are wrong, and given the self-serving nature of these scans, now your repo is just OJ Simpson? And your software is banned due to an external scan you did not ask for? Is there no one in this world who will be accountable for any thing at all? Can we sue the scanners if they are wrong and publish their results for defamation even in a public PR? These things will happen. IF I had source in the open and a scan result was incorrect that nobody asked for and the results had false positives, I would sue Anthropic for defamation and I would win.
_alternator_ 4mo ago
The article focuses on OSS, but closed-source software is at major risk too. Perhaps more. It's gotten much easier to reverse engineer binaries in general, and security patches in particular. Basically, an LLM can turn binaries into 'readable' code, and then reason about said code.
- salsakran 4mo ago
  Perhaps -- but I think for most people, the vast majority of proprietary software they consume is over the network. But yeah, if you're distributing binaries publicly, then you're going to have very similar problems.
  - redanddead 4mo ago
    That happens a lot though, even OpenAI is attempting to lock functionality (like computer-use, 2 weeks ago) behind a binary -- Mac only they said, no EU. I saw a guy crack it the same day, ported to Windows. There are many many things like Rive that use binaries, obfuscation and uglification has been the name of the proprietary game for a long ass time, with the only protection being an assumption that "nobody would go through that trouble", yeah an LLM would ralph loop through it all day long, and make what you paid good money for pretty much free for anyone to use whenever they feel like it, we're back to the the "you wouldn't download a car would you?" argument
  - yencabulator 4mo ago
    The LLM is also good at exploring the private API your web server exposes to the web UI.
- twism 4mo ago
  Does it even need to turn it into readable code?
  - _alternator_ 4mo ago
    My understanding is that decompilation into more readable code is an important step in building the path to an exploit. This understanding may be incomplete or outdated (things moving very fast right now). I'd love to hear from a someone with more experience using LLMs to do binary analysis about the level of 'binary annotation' needed for LLMs relative to humans.
hrjriritifif 4mo ago
I do not think author understands how opensource works. You have a problem on your computer, in __your__ software, and somehow some random dude is responsible for fixing it? Sure if you gimme a few kilo USDs I will drop everything and come to rescue you. But for free it is a volunteer gig I do once a month....
- salsakran 4mo ago
  I dunno man ... I produced a few things that got a few github stars over the years. At the risk of repeating myself -- this is targeted at other OSS maintainers, not random people who might have done a git pull of some random project a couple years ago.
le-mark 4mo ago
So what does this mean for the open source ecosystem? Unmaintained or “finished” projects will be labeled as to unsafe to use?
- salsakran 4mo ago
  If you're using unmaintained OSS projects in this day and age, I'm sorry to say you might deserve what happens next.
ahlCVA 4mo ago
Whenever one of these vulnerability apocalypse posts comes along I cannot help but think of the Litany of Gendlin: What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it. I cannot wrap my mind around why people think finding vulnerabilities is bad. The code already was broken before somebody published the vulnerability. The difference now only is that you know about this. Imagine somebody finding a flaw in a mathematical proof and everybody being sad because a beautiful proof got invalidated rather than being glad future work won't build on flawed assumptions. I get that the rate of vulnerability discovery can be a burden, especially for people doing FOSS in their spare time, but the sustainability problem with that has always existed and only gets exacerbated by the vulnerability stuff, but the latter isn't the cause you need to make go away.
- bell-cot 4mo ago
  > I cannot wrap my mind around why people think finding vulnerabilities is bad. The code already was broken before somebody published the vulnerability. The difference now only is that you know about this. Try binge-watching old Star Trek episodes, to see how Spock deals with the illogical 99.9% of humanity?
- esseph 4mo ago
  The vulnerability looks like a failure on the dev team's part. The patching cycle can become a problem for certain operations / industries. Everybody hates the work, and security is often seen as a barrier and a cost center, not a driver or revenue.
- _alternator_ 4mo ago
  To address this framing directly: "a bug exists" is a different truth/state of the world than "the bug is known to exist", and that's also very different from "this bug exists and an exploit is readily available". So the transmission of information about the bugs does change the state of the world, and requires action.
Macha 4mo ago
> Did you have other plans for the weekend? Or a long term project you’re prioritizing? That’s nice, you have a new plan — fix every vulnerability that comes in NOW. Or you know, provide the security companies and businesses using your software for free with all the fix timelines and out of hours support they’ve paid for (none).
- salsakran 4mo ago
  Yeah ... this gets into the question of what exactly an OSS creator's responsibility is towards users that don't pay them. In theory, nothing. In practice, it's in our long term interest that bad things don't happen to them. How sustainable all of this is, I have my doubts?
- chadgpt3 4mo ago
  It's not for the benefit of the security company though. In fact they get zero benefit from it. It's for the benefit of the users of the software which makes the calculus more complicated.
devinabox 4mo ago
This is something I struggle with as someone building a tool for debugging and security. I have dog-fooded it heavily on my own projects, client projects and friends projects. It finds things that are really quite clever and not obvious. It really helps me. But when I try to do the obvious thing for sales of using an OSS project to get hype, show off etc. I find that it becomes really hard to really know that I am helping and not just spamming. To be clear - I think for an AI tool like mine to actually give you clever results that finds not obvious issues and security flaws - it needs to have some level of false positives. I find myself struggling to justify the approach of firing off defects to an OSS maintainer without verifying them - which takes considerable time if I am going to do a good job. Even with tools to help pull apart the code, the core problem is always you don't know what you don't know. The same process working on my own projects I can eat through a ton of defects and find some really great stuff. But that's only possible because I can tell at a glance what is real, what is fake, and also what is an oh ** issue. So I think this is true, but the risk is that people who don't understand the projects just point scanners at OSS blindly and ruin the good work maintainers are doing. This stuff is more complicated than people give credit - and it's so easy to kid yourself into thinking any bug report is helpful.
- parliament32 4mo ago
  So you slop-coded a tool, you're slop-generating reports, you know it has hallucinations ("false positives").. and you're complaining it's too much work to even verify the output? And you're surprised OSS projects are pivoting towards "open source does not mean open contributions"?
  - zephen 4mo ago
    > And you're surprised OSS projects are pivoting towards "open source does not mean open contributions"? How do you get that from: > the risk is that people who don't understand the projects just point scanners at OSS blindly and ruin the good work maintainers are doing... and it's so easy to kid yourself into thinking any bug report is helpful.
mtlynch 4mo ago
> Most are not serious, and we’ve quietly fixed them, thanked the researcher, and went our merry way... These come from a wide variety of locations and people, and sometimes, but not always, are looking for bug bounties. I take it that Metabase is both not paying bug bounties and not using these tools internally? If that's the case, Metabase is not going to get meaningful investment from researchers who want to fix issues, but they'll get increased attention from malicious attackers who have no qualms exploiting the vulnerabilities for profit. LLMs have made it a lot easier for people to find vulnerabilities in software. Open-source makes it easier, but we already have non-AI tooling (IDA Pro, Ghidra) that's good at binary reverse engineering, and LLMs can use that output to find vulnerabilities as well. This year, as I select products to use for sensitive data, I've been paying a lot more attention to whether they offer bug bounties and for how much. For example, I like Kagi for search and thought about trying Orion, their web browser. Then, I saw that Kagi's been paying $100 for UXSS vulnerabilities.[0] For comparison, Firefox pays $8-10k,[1] and Chrome pays up to $10k for the same class of bug.[2] [0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/bug-bounty-program.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/bug-bounty-program.html [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/client-bug-bounty/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/client-bug-bounty/ [2] https://bughunters.google.com/about/rules/chrome-friends/chrome-vulnerability-reward-program-rules https://bughunters.google.com/about/rules/chrome-friends/chr...
- proactivepomni 4mo ago
  [dead]
- salsakran 4mo ago
  Thankfully we've historically had a fair amount of attention (and investment in our security) by both customers, our oss users and people our ecosystem. The interesting thing is that the business model seems to have changed. Why collect a 10k bounty when you can advertise a 3k/month scanner?
xbar 4mo ago
A focus on security in 2026 is driving code quality improvements in long-lived software. There is a step-function increase in the identification and remediation loop among disciplined engineers. Defining an "era" as a "summer" is short-sighted. Calling an industry-wide efforts to find and fix security vulnerabilities with better tools "strip mining" is backwards thinking, from where I sit. People who prefer 0days in their code baffle me.
cyrusradfar 4mo ago
I'd buy the core thesis and appreciate the concern. I do think security is going to require more, not, less human investment as attackers may be running automated vulnerability screens from the outside that you must counter, as well. Without rigorous internal processes to manage and screen all changes and upgrades, companies risk leaving themselves open. One design change which limits exposure is to have more local-first apps or experiences so there's less cloud / server to computer interactions to secure.
ryaniscool 4mo ago
This needs to be read after the article from Turso on how they're retiring their bug bounty program because of being inundated with useless AI slop reports. It's the top story on HN right now. https://turso.tech/blog/the-wonders-of-ai https://turso.tech/blog/the-wonders-of-ai
likesHumidity 4mo ago
I think this is going to play out in interesting ways. There's a saying in lockpicking: even if you can pick the lock, the easiest way in is usually a window. Distribution is core to a technology's market reach, and every distribution point is a window. The strip-mining piece reads to me as one phase of a longer cycle — tech distributed → adopted → experimented with → misused → secondary protection market emerges. The 2017 S3 misconfiguration wave is a useful reference: Verizon and Booz Allen both spilled data through bucket ACLs with inadequate controls, AWS responded with Block Public Access, and the CSPM market matured to sell the discipline back. Mythos looks like the same shape at the AI layer — leaked via vendor environment chain (Mercor breach + contractor credentials + URL guessing), not code-level vulnerability. The proliferation of high-quality security research the article points at reads to me as one sign of the secondary market forming as the primary disruptive technology stabilizes — Gartner already has AI governance spending crossing $1B by 2030. And it seems to be landing on OSS first because that's where the surface area and public exposure are, which is what the labor pressure is documenting. Cascade to closed source seems likely as the compression between vulnerability-introduced and vulnerability-identified continues, just on a lag and behind NDAs. The OSS side could go either way under that pressure, and I don't know which dominates. FFmpeg slowed in 2024 from overload and got rescued by Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund — pressure converted into hardened posture. Ingress-Nginx retired November 2025 after two maintainers couldn't sustain it on weekends, despite running in ~50% of cloud-native environments — same pressure, no backing. Tracks institutional backing more than anything intrinsic to OSS. The wrinkle Mythos adds: same product is both weapon and salve. Pay to run it against your own systems, or be vulnerable to what it finds in everyone else's — discovery and protection collapsed into one SKU. We'll need to watch the locksmiths to see if they end up selling lockpicks in addition to keys. Going to be an interesting summer.
krupan 4mo ago
AI hype. Don't bother

132 points by salsakran 4mo ago

Clearly for commercial oriented opensource software, security through obscurity is one way to keep the pace in the short term. Not an option for proper open source software. Will this be the case that people who use open source software that is easily detectable will also start to shy away from using them for the fear of zero-days? One of the benefits of Open source has been that there are more eye balls on the source, leading to more secure code/better quality. I think given enough time the bug reports will plateau and we will be back to a normal cadence - once the tsunami is over, hopefully things will settle at a more manageable cadence .

dynawicki 4mo ago
This benefit you speak of is actually just a meme. Source that is unmaintained is dead. Nobody is looking at it, even the maintainer has something better to do. Do you know whats even more powerful than "eyeballs"? Money.
salsakran 4mo ago
I'm not sure that the benefit of many eyes helps here. So much of this bulk scanning is low-effort, and if you're a smart person developing closed source software you get the benefits of bulk scanning, but _at the time of your choosing_ . OSS has always had tradeoffs and I sadly think this one is going straight to the "Cons" column. We still think the Pros outweigh the Cons, but this is NotGreat.
Joel_Mckay 4mo ago
Lets be honest, LLM with fuzzers are going to pound any llvm generated binary right in the hubris. Won't matter if is closed source, signed, and or obfuscated. =3
- zephen 4mo ago
  Don't think you even need to qualify that with "llvm generated."
  - Joel_Mckay 4mo ago
    Nondeterministic compiled code-motion in llvm means a workaround can't reliably be patched given version permuted bug emergence. Fun times =3
    - zephen 4mo ago
      It's certainly possible to write optimizations that generate nondeterministic llvm outputs, but the docs explain conditions when that can happen, and warn against it.

dynawicki 4mo ago

Good luck getting anyone who values their time to even triage the results. I would rather lick the bottom of a NYC dumpster that a rat had just died in.

salsakran 4mo ago
That was true last year -- things changes. Ignore (admittedly low-effort LLM generated) reports at your own peril.
- dynawicki 4mo ago
  Software will eventually become "unmaintainable due to lack of interest", because of this very thing. People not invested in this are not "in peril" in any way.
  - bluGill 4mo ago
    A lot of people are invested without realizing it. I'm typing this on a computer running linux, with all the standard services/software. I maintain one OSS project (icecc - we have always said only run on trusted networks. I'm sure there are a lot of issues in our code but nobody has bothered run a scan yet to my knowledge), but I don't pay attention to everything. I'm sure there are known easy to exploit (with a LLM) issues on this computer just because my distro hasn't updated yet. (I need a better distro, but even the most up to date will constantly have these issues)
    - dynawicki 4mo ago
      What you just described may be accurate. But it also is the essence of a "trap". My comment about investment was more to that point. If software "is a trap", even my ever-computing loving wrote first programs on an Apple II in the 80s will only be as you sort of describe invested in by reference (minimal usage). But no-one will sign up for a "trap" as a career, and only those who do will deal with its problems. The first thing that comes to mind is "Johns", "Hotels", and the trappings of the sex trade.

gmuslera 4mo ago

The problem on the side of closed source software is that if there had been leaks of source code, the vulnerabilities and exploits may remain unknown for long time.

pixl97 4mo ago
I would go to say that most closed source software code gets leaked. Most companies hold that info close and don't disclose it, even if legally required unless it's made public.

aetherspawn 4mo ago

Say I had $1000, how do I get the best value for money to discover vulnerabilities? Are there any worthwhile LLM powered services that are turnkey and ready to go?

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
ben_w 4mo ago
From what I've heard, every LLM before Mythos (which you can't get, they'll call you if you're big enough) will have far too many false positives to be helpful, so I guess the best option would be to use an agent to help you (not lights-off vibe coding!*) take advantage of all the older tools like valgrind and closing all the compiler warnings? * I presume I'm not the only one to find the agents tasked with adding unit tests will sometimes try to sneak through "open source code and apply regex to confirm presence or absence of specific string literal". They can speed you up significantly, but you absolutely do need to pay attention to what they produce.
- salsakran 4mo ago
  With all respect to the Anthropic folks, that's just marketing. (If they're reading this: let us into the program so I can be proven wrong here.) I'm sure what they have is awesome, but it's clear that there are people out there with some decent prompts that are getting results out of widely available models as well. The big thing we're sharing is: bulk scanning by random people in random geographies got a _lot_ better around January, it's widely distributed, and it's going to get a lot better regardless of whether that specific version of Mythos becomes widely available or not.
  - embedding-shape 4mo ago
    > prompts that are getting results out of widely available models as well. Absolutely, and the "false-positive" issue people keep citing as why Mythos is so good is easily solved in the harness, simplest solution is starting fresh context with another prompt to evaluate if it's a false-positive or not, just adding that drastically cuts down the rate.

adamtaylor_13 4mo ago

> Did you have other plans for the weekend? Or a long term project you’re prioritizing? That’s nice, you have a new plan — fix every vulnerability that comes in NOW. Umm... no? It's called OPEN source. Expecting people to cancel their plans to make your free software more secure is pretty audacious. Luckily, many WILL, but the expectation is just foolish.

salsakran 4mo ago
That line was aimed at other OSS maintainers. These alerts are absolutely not being shared publicly before we have a fix for them.
- orthoxerox 4mo ago
  Sorry for all caps, but for some reasons OSS licenses think this is the proper way to style this paragraph MIT: THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. BSD: THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS “AS IS” AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. OSS maintainers don't owe anyone shit. Anyone who thinks fixing the bug is important is free to fix it and submit a patch.

salsakran 4mo ago

Side conversation -- This is all stuff we're seeing in white/grey hat land. What's going on in blackhat land?

bluGill 4mo ago
Nobody really knows of course. However it is safe to assume they are not so stupid as to ignore what is happening in the other areas (at least some of them), and so they are running their own targeted scans and then trying to figure out how to make money (or whatever their goal is) by exploiting them. They are also using LLMs to try things on closed source that are more than a brute force attack, though I have no idea what those would be.

as3qkaH 4mo ago

Apparently the AI company Metabase has a very poor code base. Like so many others, instead of questioning their own (or AI) output, they help their AI overlords by promoting security scans. Fact is that Mythos found only one issue in curl and nothing at all in most code bases. It is getting quiet around Mythos, and the AI companies will move on to the next scam.

bluGill 4mo ago
Mythos found only one issue in curl - but it didn't start until many other LLMs had been run and found a lot of issues that were fixed. If Mythos was run a year ago it would have found over 100 issues (of course it didn't exist a year ago, nor did the other tools).
- 4ladf1 4mo ago
  Curl had many old protocols and code from the 1990s that no one used. Besides, Mythos was claimed to be better than existing tools. In most open source projects, Mythos or similar tools have found nothing. The AI people only contact the projects where they find something, because it would be bad for marketing otherwise.
  - dynawicki 4mo ago
    This is now the open source problem. And why my personal opus of work has been removed from online repositories. Who gave them "the right to scan"? You did by hosting your open source in public. But scanning a public service prior to AI was still covered by "Unauthorized System Access". But what if they are wrong, and given the self-serving nature of these scans, now your repo is just OJ Simpson? And your software is banned due to an external scan you did not ask for? Is there no one in this world who will be accountable for any thing at all? Can we sue the scanners if they are wrong and publish their results for defamation even in a public PR? These things will happen. IF I had source in the open and a scan result was incorrect that nobody asked for and the results had false positives, I would sue Anthropic for defamation and I would win.

_alternator_ 4mo ago

The article focuses on OSS, but closed-source software is at major risk too. Perhaps more. It's gotten much easier to reverse engineer binaries in general, and security patches in particular. Basically, an LLM can turn binaries into 'readable' code, and then reason about said code.

salsakran 4mo ago
Perhaps -- but I think for most people, the vast majority of proprietary software they consume is over the network. But yeah, if you're distributing binaries publicly, then you're going to have very similar problems.
- redanddead 4mo ago
  That happens a lot though, even OpenAI is attempting to lock functionality (like computer-use, 2 weeks ago) behind a binary -- Mac only they said, no EU. I saw a guy crack it the same day, ported to Windows. There are many many things like Rive that use binaries, obfuscation and uglification has been the name of the proprietary game for a long ass time, with the only protection being an assumption that "nobody would go through that trouble", yeah an LLM would ralph loop through it all day long, and make what you paid good money for pretty much free for anyone to use whenever they feel like it, we're back to the the "you wouldn't download a car would you?" argument
- yencabulator 4mo ago
  The LLM is also good at exploring the private API your web server exposes to the web UI.
twism 4mo ago
Does it even need to turn it into readable code?
- _alternator_ 4mo ago
  My understanding is that decompilation into more readable code is an important step in building the path to an exploit. This understanding may be incomplete or outdated (things moving very fast right now). I'd love to hear from a someone with more experience using LLMs to do binary analysis about the level of 'binary annotation' needed for LLMs relative to humans.

hrjriritifif 4mo ago

I do not think author understands how opensource works. You have a problem on your computer, in __your__ software, and somehow some random dude is responsible for fixing it? Sure if you gimme a few kilo USDs I will drop everything and come to rescue you. But for free it is a volunteer gig I do once a month....

salsakran 4mo ago
I dunno man ... I produced a few things that got a few github stars over the years. At the risk of repeating myself -- this is targeted at other OSS maintainers, not random people who might have done a git pull of some random project a couple years ago.

le-mark 4mo ago

So what does this mean for the open source ecosystem? Unmaintained or “finished” projects will be labeled as to unsafe to use?

salsakran 4mo ago
If you're using unmaintained OSS projects in this day and age, I'm sorry to say you might deserve what happens next.

ahlCVA 4mo ago

Whenever one of these vulnerability apocalypse posts comes along I cannot help but think of the Litany of Gendlin: What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it. I cannot wrap my mind around why people think finding vulnerabilities is bad. The code already was broken before somebody published the vulnerability. The difference now only is that you know about this. Imagine somebody finding a flaw in a mathematical proof and everybody being sad because a beautiful proof got invalidated rather than being glad future work won't build on flawed assumptions. I get that the rate of vulnerability discovery can be a burden, especially for people doing FOSS in their spare time, but the sustainability problem with that has always existed and only gets exacerbated by the vulnerability stuff, but the latter isn't the cause you need to make go away.

bell-cot 4mo ago
> I cannot wrap my mind around why people think finding vulnerabilities is bad. The code already was broken before somebody published the vulnerability. The difference now only is that you know about this. Try binge-watching old Star Trek episodes, to see how Spock deals with the illogical 99.9% of humanity?
esseph 4mo ago
The vulnerability looks like a failure on the dev team's part. The patching cycle can become a problem for certain operations / industries. Everybody hates the work, and security is often seen as a barrier and a cost center, not a driver or revenue.
_alternator_ 4mo ago
To address this framing directly: "a bug exists" is a different truth/state of the world than "the bug is known to exist", and that's also very different from "this bug exists and an exploit is readily available". So the transmission of information about the bugs does change the state of the world, and requires action.

Macha 4mo ago

> Did you have other plans for the weekend? Or a long term project you’re prioritizing? That’s nice, you have a new plan — fix every vulnerability that comes in NOW. Or you know, provide the security companies and businesses using your software for free with all the fix timelines and out of hours support they’ve paid for (none).

salsakran 4mo ago
Yeah ... this gets into the question of what exactly an OSS creator's responsibility is towards users that don't pay them. In theory, nothing. In practice, it's in our long term interest that bad things don't happen to them. How sustainable all of this is, I have my doubts?
chadgpt3 4mo ago
It's not for the benefit of the security company though. In fact they get zero benefit from it. It's for the benefit of the users of the software which makes the calculus more complicated.

devinabox 4mo ago

This is something I struggle with as someone building a tool for debugging and security. I have dog-fooded it heavily on my own projects, client projects and friends projects. It finds things that are really quite clever and not obvious. It really helps me. But when I try to do the obvious thing for sales of using an OSS project to get hype, show off etc. I find that it becomes really hard to really know that I am helping and not just spamming. To be clear - I think for an AI tool like mine to actually give you clever results that finds not obvious issues and security flaws - it needs to have some level of false positives. I find myself struggling to justify the approach of firing off defects to an OSS maintainer without verifying them - which takes considerable time if I am going to do a good job. Even with tools to help pull apart the code, the core problem is always you don't know what you don't know. The same process working on my own projects I can eat through a ton of defects and find some really great stuff. But that's only possible because I can tell at a glance what is real, what is fake, and also what is an oh ** issue. So I think this is true, but the risk is that people who don't understand the projects just point scanners at OSS blindly and ruin the good work maintainers are doing. This stuff is more complicated than people give credit - and it's so easy to kid yourself into thinking any bug report is helpful.

parliament32 4mo ago
So you slop-coded a tool, you're slop-generating reports, you know it has hallucinations ("false positives").. and you're complaining it's too much work to even verify the output? And you're surprised OSS projects are pivoting towards "open source does not mean open contributions"?
- zephen 4mo ago
  > And you're surprised OSS projects are pivoting towards "open source does not mean open contributions"? How do you get that from: > the risk is that people who don't understand the projects just point scanners at OSS blindly and ruin the good work maintainers are doing... and it's so easy to kid yourself into thinking any bug report is helpful.

mtlynch 4mo ago

> Most are not serious, and we’ve quietly fixed them, thanked the researcher, and went our merry way... These come from a wide variety of locations and people, and sometimes, but not always, are looking for bug bounties. I take it that Metabase is both not paying bug bounties and not using these tools internally? If that's the case, Metabase is not going to get meaningful investment from researchers who want to fix issues, but they'll get increased attention from malicious attackers who have no qualms exploiting the vulnerabilities for profit. LLMs have made it a lot easier for people to find vulnerabilities in software. Open-source makes it easier, but we already have non-AI tooling (IDA Pro, Ghidra) that's good at binary reverse engineering, and LLMs can use that output to find vulnerabilities as well. This year, as I select products to use for sensitive data, I've been paying a lot more attention to whether they offer bug bounties and for how much. For example, I like Kagi for search and thought about trying Orion, their web browser. Then, I saw that Kagi's been paying $100 for UXSS vulnerabilities.[0] For comparison, Firefox pays $8-10k,[1] and Chrome pays up to $10k for the same class of bug.[2] [0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/bug-bounty-program.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/bug-bounty-program.html [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/client-bug-bounty/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/client-bug-bounty/ [2] https://bughunters.google.com/about/rules/chrome-friends/chrome-vulnerability-reward-program-rules https://bughunters.google.com/about/rules/chrome-friends/chr...

proactivepomni 4mo ago
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salsakran 4mo ago
Thankfully we've historically had a fair amount of attention (and investment in our security) by both customers, our oss users and people our ecosystem. The interesting thing is that the business model seems to have changed. Why collect a 10k bounty when you can advertise a 3k/month scanner?

xbar 4mo ago

A focus on security in 2026 is driving code quality improvements in long-lived software. There is a step-function increase in the identification and remediation loop among disciplined engineers. Defining an "era" as a "summer" is short-sighted. Calling an industry-wide efforts to find and fix security vulnerabilities with better tools "strip mining" is backwards thinking, from where I sit. People who prefer 0days in their code baffle me.

cyrusradfar 4mo ago

I'd buy the core thesis and appreciate the concern. I do think security is going to require more, not, less human investment as attackers may be running automated vulnerability screens from the outside that you must counter, as well. Without rigorous internal processes to manage and screen all changes and upgrades, companies risk leaving themselves open. One design change which limits exposure is to have more local-first apps or experiences so there's less cloud / server to computer interactions to secure.

ryaniscool 4mo ago

This needs to be read after the article from Turso on how they're retiring their bug bounty program because of being inundated with useless AI slop reports. It's the top story on HN right now. https://turso.tech/blog/the-wonders-of-ai https://turso.tech/blog/the-wonders-of-ai

likesHumidity 4mo ago

I think this is going to play out in interesting ways. There's a saying in lockpicking: even if you can pick the lock, the easiest way in is usually a window. Distribution is core to a technology's market reach, and every distribution point is a window. The strip-mining piece reads to me as one phase of a longer cycle — tech distributed → adopted → experimented with → misused → secondary protection market emerges. The 2017 S3 misconfiguration wave is a useful reference: Verizon and Booz Allen both spilled data through bucket ACLs with inadequate controls, AWS responded with Block Public Access, and the CSPM market matured to sell the discipline back. Mythos looks like the same shape at the AI layer — leaked via vendor environment chain (Mercor breach + contractor credentials + URL guessing), not code-level vulnerability. The proliferation of high-quality security research the article points at reads to me as one sign of the secondary market forming as the primary disruptive technology stabilizes — Gartner already has AI governance spending crossing $1B by 2030. And it seems to be landing on OSS first because that's where the surface area and public exposure are, which is what the labor pressure is documenting. Cascade to closed source seems likely as the compression between vulnerability-introduced and vulnerability-identified continues, just on a lag and behind NDAs. The OSS side could go either way under that pressure, and I don't know which dominates. FFmpeg slowed in 2024 from overload and got rescued by Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund — pressure converted into hardened posture. Ingress-Nginx retired November 2025 after two maintainers couldn't sustain it on weekends, despite running in ~50% of cloud-native environments — same pressure, no backing. Tracks institutional backing more than anything intrinsic to OSS. The wrinkle Mythos adds: same product is both weapon and salve. Pay to run it against your own systems, or be vulnerable to what it finds in everyone else's — discovery and protection collapsed into one SKU. We'll need to watch the locksmiths to see if they end up selling lockpicks in addition to keys. Going to be an interesting summer.

krupan 4mo ago

AI hype. Don't bother