11 comments

  • tptacek 37 minutes ago

    The thing about things like this is that they're shop jigs. You can buy a crosscut sled if you really want to, but most woodworkers just make their own.

    It was a different situation 2 years ago, when there was significant cost to building your own harness (but then: you probably weren't doing AI vuln research 2 years ago). Today, I think your best bet is to look at something like this for ideas, and then just ask for your own, to fit your own work style, with your own interface, your own notion of target and effort specification, and your own alerting.

    • zuzululu 8 minutes ago

      This seems like an AI generated comment

    • dclavijo 9 minutes ago

      Here is my own implementación based on cloufare blog post and Evilsocket/audit: https://github.com/daedalus/ai-vuln-harness

      • simonw 1 hour ago

        I wonder how much this thing costs to run.

        https://github.com/anthropics/defending-code-reference-harne... says:

        > As a rough guideline, expect ~10K uncached input tokens/min and ~2K output tokens/min per agent. You can scale parallelism up to your account's ITPM limit (roughly 10 agents per 100K ITPM).

        My guess would be hundreds of dollars with Opus and thousands of dollars with Mythos.

        • nikcub 1 hour ago

          It's becoming apparent that it requires more tokens to secure code than it does to write it

          May even be an order of magnitude more

          • Mtinie 50 minutes ago

            In all seriousness, wasn’t that always the case? Writing bad code is relatively cheap.

            Ensuring code isn’t bad is the expensive part.

            • tptacek 35 minutes ago

              For now, maybe, yes? But the most important targets of this kind of work aren't AI outputs; it's legacy code, particularly (but not exclusively) old memory-unsafe code. In those situations the figure of merit isn't the token cost of recreating the target code; it's the cost of finding the same bugs with humans or preexisting tools.

              Those costs can be extremely high.

              • bflesch 39 minutes ago

                It's weird because why can't they train the AI to simply output secure code?

                The basic security flaws with regards to input validation and overflows should never ever be output by an AI. For "security flaws due to bad design" I'll cut them slack until AGI is achieved.

                • simonw 16 minutes ago

                  > It's weird because why can't they train the AI to simply output secure code?

                  The most interesting security bugs have causes that are spread across large codebases, or networks of dependencies.

                  Training the AI to "output secure code" won't work if it doesn't also have access to the source code of every dependency that it's using... and even then, given current model speeds and prices most developers won't want to wait for an hour on every edit they make while the LLM reasons through all of the dependencies.

              • Analemma_ 1 hour ago

                I mean, you don't need to run it all the time, right? You do it once over your entire existing codebase to start and then once over the diff in your CI/CD pipeline when you make a new change. I'm sure it's not literally that simple but I doubt these need to churn 24/7/365 either.

                • xerxes249 56 minutes ago

                  In the Mythos blogpost they revealed to run the model like a 1000 times on the same code-base maybe with slightly different prompt or temperature. That suggests it will just be pay to win. If the 'attacker' spends more money/tokens than the 'defender' you will eventually be outclassed.

                  • vb-8448 49 minutes ago

                    You are supposed to run it on full codebase before any single PR gets merge.

                    • jazz9k 56 minutes ago

                      Companies don't make production pushes yearly. For many, it's two week sprints..and that's one project.

                      This doesn't make any sense cost-wise. It would be cheaper to just hire a security engineer.

                  • richardbarosky 58 minutes ago

                    To be sure, security is an amazing AI/LLM use case. A huge swath of the work is pattern matching known security issues against stuff that's very precise to analyze -- programming language text.

                    Something that stands out is that for the strongest use cases, AI companies will prefer to sell the technique as a service rather than its raw output. For use cases where the output is less valuable, tokens are sold. If AI tokens were so magical in creating new value in developing software applications generally, they wouldn't be selling tokens directly. They'd hoard the tokens are use them to dominate SaaS software in any industry they want.

                    The same way as someone selling an expensive course in the stock market is signaling that they have more to gain by selling the course rather than taking their knowledge and making money in the stock market directly.

                    • Kiro 24 minutes ago

                      > They'd hoard the tokens are use them to dominate SaaS software in any industry they want.

                      I don't understand this argument. I've ran and sold a semi-successful SaaS. The exhausting and frustrating parts are all the things an LLM cannot help you with. Coding the product is not the bottleneck or what grants you success.

                      • richardbarosky 14 minutes ago

                        > Coding the product is not the bottleneck or what grants you success.

                        Agree, and I think that's the core of my point.

                        Not that it's irrational or doesn't make sense to sell tokens for purposes of software dev, but that if tokens were a true game changer for success in software dev, they wouldn't be leading with token sales, the same way they're not leading with token sales for security stuff -- looks like it's all about Claude Security(TM).

                      • dgellow 46 minutes ago

                        > The same way as someone selling an expensive course in the stock market is signaling that they have more to gain by selling the course rather than

                        Or they want to diversify

                        > If AI tokens were so magical in creating new value in developing software applications generally, they wouldn't be selling tokens directly.

                        That requires to build and sell a whole product they have little experience with, competing with their own customers. Not a great place for an AI vendor still trying to establish itself. It’s a lot of distraction, when you already have a lot to deal with the existing business. And strategically not too valuable

                        • Melatonic 15 minutes ago

                          Surprised we havent gotten an integrated "MetaSploit" AI update where it calls and messages a ton of people in a company and once it starts to find someone possibly vulnerable lets a human red teamer take over or guide it more by hand.

                          • skybrian 39 minutes ago

                            Maybe, but an alternative argument that building an ecosystem is more valuable in the long run.

                            We started out with many companies forbidding their employees to use remote LLMs on their source code because of security concerns. Now many companies are starting to believe that they must analyze their all their source code with remote LLMs because of security concerns. When trusting Anthropic becomes normalized, that means they can sell more services that require access to the source code.

                            • energy123 38 minutes ago

                              They can only do that if they're a monopoly, which they're not

                              • DrewADesign 33 minutes ago

                                > They can only do that if they're a monopoly, which they're not

                                Why do you say that? I reckon lots and lots of companies sell software that aren’t monopolies. Having competition, even stiff competition, isn’t anathema to running a business.

                                • energy123 26 minutes ago

                                  You said "They wouldn't be selling tokens directly ... They'd hoard them"

                                  But they can't do that because they aren't monopolies.

                            • >This repo is not maintained and is not accepting contributions.

                              Hm :)

                            • extr 21 minutes ago

                              Interesting it's in python!

                              • zoobab 12 minutes ago

                                'open source' crap to connect to their LLM blob.

                                • bigmattystyles 1 hour ago

                                  I wonder how this sort of product is going over at Coverity and others like it. Proper SAST vendors I mean. Is it an existential threat?

                                  • bartoszcki 24 minutes ago

                                    > Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter

                                    Are they making 8x more features or the same amount just with more code?

                                    • zoobab 13 minutes ago

                                      Open source crap to connect to an LLM blob.

                                      • trilogic 1 hour ago

                                        https://github.com/Mainframework/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Ski...

                                        Be aware: the .py/s will not pass the antivirus but basically they do the job.