Hacker News

points by rvz 3 hours ago | 0 comments

This one is quite serious and the type of vulnerability is once again, a C style memory corruption and a race condition combined; leading to an RCE.

At this point, we seriously need to discuss whether if the major projects still written in C such as Linux, Chromium and even git can even handle the stream of now near infinite bugs being discovered with AI.

Attackers are already rapidly finding and building exploits for those vulnerabilities the moment they are discovered with abliterated frontier-level models.

These sort of vulnerabilities are far to common in those projects and in the future, it will be extremely unsafe for even experts to continue using C or C++ in any way.

[–] MithrilTuxedo 3 hours ago

I bet there's a half-life to bugs though. Bugs might be infinite over the lifespan of a project, but the rate that they are produced goes down with our ability to detect them.

A lot are being found _now_ in projects written in C because the backlog of bugs to find is mostly written in C. We haven't yet gotten to the point when we're detecting most bugs before they're released, but we will.

Things won't get worse for too long. If we haven't already surpassed it, we're approaching the point of being able to do static analysis and ensure the mathematical correctness of the most complex C programs ever written so far.

I don't use C or C++, but look how much safer it is to use C or C++ these days.

[–] spauldo 3 hours ago

Unless someone vibecodes a new OS and convinces everyone to use it, we're stuck with what we got. Reaching feature parity with Linux and then debugging it to the point where it'd be usable is a gargantuan undertaking.

[–] worthless-trash 3 hours ago

Leading 'maybe' to an RCE, i imagine you need to groom the heap first, unless there is something i'm missing.

Edit: also thanks for using RCE correctly, it seems to be any kind of code execution these days is considered "RCE".. boo.

[–] perching_aix 2 hours ago

You severely underestimate humanity's goalpost moving capabilities.

The state of cope:

- models are still not intelligent, they're just like, uhh, really good semantic fuzzers! so you can just put them in the loop, they'll fuzz your code, and all is good :)

- the number of bugs is "finite", so - esp with agentic help - we'll just catch up and all will be good :)

Annoyingly, the cope frontier is kinda right about both of these, so the joke shall go on. The only real counter to it would be to bring up that this finiteness claim only really applies to a frozen set of security boundaries and attack surfaces, but they'll probably just raise this being "an academic tier concern" and just tell you to ""fuzz"" more.

So ironically, it looks like these practices are rescued once again, and the bare minimum stays winning. It also starts being moved to the territory of the magic box, but I guess nobody cares about that anymore. Local AI will just get really good too, fully competitive and self hostable even. Any day now.

From the horse's mouth, in case you were suspecting these descriptions to be in bad faith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnV_cWeoo5Q