security

Ok fine, where can I get me one of these “security harnesses” you speak of?

Ok, so in a recent post I summarized some reading I had recently done about security harnesses. When I say “security harness” think “thingie which orchestrates many many LLM sessions to turn tokens and environmental stability into zero day vulnerabilities and dopamine”. That is, as Claude Code is to code generation, a security harness is to vulnerability hunting.

The next obvious step is to try one of these things and see if it does what it says it does on the tin. That is, do I get the dopamines? The problem of course is finding one.

A harness is the orchestration layer around an LLM. It controls the inputs, tools, prompts, models, state, validation gates and outputs for each stage of work. — ZephrSec

(more…)

Continue ReadingOk fine, where can I get me one of these “security harnesses” you speak of?

What is a LLM “security harness” and why do people keep talking to me about them?

Increasingly I am being told to “use a security harness” when analyzing code for potential vulnerabilities, but what is a “harness” and how does it differ from just running Claude Code and asking it nicely to find me some sweet vulns?

This post is literally my notes on reading up on this topic via a series of Cloudflare blog posts. That is, this post is a summary and does not intend to provide anything you cannot find anywhere else (with a lot more words used).

(more…)

Continue ReadingWhat is a LLM “security harness” and why do people keep talking to me about them?

Claude Code is scary good at APK reverse engineering

A couple of weekends ago, Cat and I had a Bluetti home battery installed. Bluetti seems to be taking the open source community fairly seriously, and there was already a Home Assistant integration available on github, which is impressive. Before installation it was hard to tell if my EP760 inverter with "PBOX" IoT dongly thing was well supported or not, so we just kind of YOLO'ed it. Sadly, the existing open source Bluetti projects I looked at had pretty poor support for this model. However, I've spent a fair bit of time in the last year reading and watching tutorials on YouTube about Android reverse engineering, so I knew at least that JADX existed and how to run it to extract source code. I've also been playing around a lot with Claude Code, and it had done a fairly good job at analyzing malicious APKs from the courses I'd done, so I thought perhaps I could do something interesting here. Its super common for APKs to be obfuscated with commercial tools, but notably Claude is also pretty good at unwinding that obfuscation in a way in which its probably no longer a particularly effective technique for stopping analysis of otherwise…

Continue ReadingClaude Code is scary good at APK reverse engineering

I think I just experienced my first hallucinated security vulnerability

Yesterday my time I experienced what I think was my first LLM hallucinating a responsible security disclosure. Honestly it was no curl situation, but I think it was still interesting. The bug is on launchpad.net if you're interested in taking a look. I think in total I spent a couple of hours on the whole thing, with the hardest bit being trying to understand what the author was claiming. Fundamentally they had conflated being able to change the state of memory and other hardware inside their virtual machine with changing the state of those things for the hypervisor. They did not seem to understand that the video memory of the guest was not the video memory of the host for example. That said, I tried to be nice and I hope my replies were perhaps a little useful to them.

Continue ReadingI think I just experienced my first hallucinated security vulnerability

The Kubernetes Book (2024 edition)

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Book

This is yet another accidental purchase of a self-published book, although I think this one makes a lot of sense as a self published work. Writing a technical reference book isn't a particularly lucrative pastime for most authors, and self publishing likely makes it more worthwhile than the traditional publisher route, especially if you can rustle up a good set of technical editors and reviewers yourself. That said, I think one of the risks with self published technical books like this is that they are overly credulous, and I think this book falls into that trap early by describing Kubernetes as the "cloud operating system". Like I get it, you're excited about Kubernetes, but making claims that all of the cloud runs on Kubernetes just undermines your work before you've even really started. I can't find any public data, either academic or anecdotal, which supports the assertion that Kubernetes is even the most popular way to run workloads in clouds. I'm sure that AWS has more VMs not running Kubernetes for example than they do have running it. That said, it is clear at this point that Kubernetes is the dominant player for container clustering. So why not just say…

Continue ReadingThe Kubernetes Book (2024 edition)

The Cuckoo’s Egg

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Book

In 1986, Clifford Stoll and his coworkers were frustrated by what they thought was a billing error of 75 cents in their monthly accounting. Suspecting a software bug, the new guy (Clifford) was put on to working out the error as a starter problem while he got familiar with the systems he was to manage... I've been home sick this week with a chest infection, and what with having a limited oxygen supply I didn't feel like I was braining super well. So what better way to pass the time between naps than another old book I've read before? This is another book I must have read before I started blogging such things, but discussions of old computing systems made me a bit nostalgic for a good gold fashioned tale of computer hackery. The story has some historical significance too, as shown by this quote from Wikipedia: This was one of the first⁠ —⁠ if not the first ⁠— documented cases of a computer break-in, and Stoll seems to have been the first to keep a daily logbook of the hacker's activities. There are a few things which strike me about this story -- Stoll was lucky. He arguably committed…

Continue ReadingThe Cuckoo’s Egg

Do you want the apocalypse, because this is how you get it

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Security

So I read this paper over the weekend. Naively, its a resonably interesting piece of research around using a generative AI to use descriptions of CVEs from their responsible disclosures to exploit unpatched systems autonomously. Now read that sentence again -- these people prompted Chat GPT4 with CVES which didn't have fixes yet, and had it hacking unpatched systems with an 85% success rate. We're doomed.

Continue ReadingDo you want the apocalypse, because this is how you get it

Cult of the Dead Cow

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Book

A very readable history of the early US hacking scene, including the roots of Def Con and Blackhat security conferences. The book is filled with a cast of characters many of whose names and exploits I recognize -- although I've only met one or two in person. The book is definitely US-centric in it's coverage but an interesting way to spend a summer evening or two. Menn (the author) spends a lot of time working through the moral reasoning that led a group formed out of an interest in how things worked and a sense of community among the socially awkward, to a group that made a profound difference to how we think about responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities and our obligations as technologists while at the same time trying to be funny (the hackers, not the author). The description of how cDc dragged Microsoft kicking and screaming into taking security for their software seriously is both funny and interesting, as well as the discussion of early attempts at responsible disclosure at a time where software vendors would sue instead of fixing their products. I find the descriptions of the various players "going straight" and acquiring actual jobs in order…

Continue ReadingCult of the Dead Cow

End of content

No more pages to load

Older Posts