Someone in the comments linked this post from 2015 talking about the Cyber Grand Challenge this post mentions, it's an interesting reminder that this didn't just pop out of nowhere.
Well, in another subthread the author said he did in fact make a crashing PoC. I guess it depends on the customer's standards, but I would say in the vast majority of cases (especially for nuanced memory corruptions in which the ability to make something exploitable depends on your ability to demonstrate control of the heap) a crashing PoC is the bare minimum. In most VDPs, BBPs, or red team engagements you are required to provide some sort of proof to claim, otherwise you'll be laughed out of the room.
I'm curious which sector of infosec you're referring to in which vulnerability researchers are not required to provide proofs of concept? Maybe internal product VR where there is already an established trust?
I'm too much of a skeptic to not do so lol. Great post though overall, don't let my assholery dissuade you! I was pleasantly surprised that it was actually a researcher behind the news story and there was some real evidence / scientific procedure. I thought you had a lot of good insights into how to use LLMs in the VR space specifically, and I'm glad you did benchmarking. It's interesting to see how they're improving.
Yeah race conditions like that are always tricky to make reliable. And yeah I do realize that the purpose of the writeup was more about the efficacy of using LLMs vs the bug itself, and I did get a lot out of that part, I just hyper-focused on the bug because it's what I tend to care the most about. In the end I agree with your conclusion, I believe LLMs are going to become a key part of the VR workflow as they improve and I'm grateful for folks like yourself documenting a way forward for their integration.
Anyways, solid writeup and really appreciate the follow-up!
Thank you! I'm really happy to hear you did that. But why not mention that in your blog post? I understand not wanting to include a PoC for responsible disclosure reasons, but including it would have added a lot of credibility to your work for assholes like me lol
PoCs should at least trigger a crash, overwrite a register, or have some other provable effect, the point being to determine:
1) If it is actually a UAF or if there is some other mechanism missing from the context that prevents UAF.
2) The category and severity of the vulnerability. Is it even a DoS, RCE, or is the only impact causing a thread to segfault?
This is all part of the standard vulnerability research process. I'm honestly surprised it got merged in without a PoC, although with high profile projects even the suggestion of a vulnerability in code that can clearly be improved will probably end up getting merged.
I know there were at least a few kernel devs who "validated" this bug, but did anyone actually build a PoC and test it? It's such a critical piece of the process yet a proof of concept is completely omitted? If you don't have a PoC, you don't know what sort of hiccups would come along the way and therefore can't determine exploitability or impact. At least the author avoided calling it an RCE without validation.
But what if there's a missing piece of the puzzle that the author and devs missed or assumed o3 covered, but in fact was out of o3's context, that would invalidate this vulnerability?
I'm not saying there is, nor am I going to take the time to do the author's work for them, rather I am saying this report is not fully validated which feels like a dangerous precedent to set with what will likely be an influential blog post in the LLM VR space moving forward.
IMO the idea of PoC || GTFO should be applied more strictly than ever before to any vulnerability report generated by a model.
The underlying perspective that o3 is much better than previous or other current models still remains, and the methodology is still interesting. I understand the desire and need to get people to focus on something by wording it a specific way, it's the clickbait problem. But dammit, do better. Build a PoC and validate your claims, don't be lazy. If you're going to write a blog post that might influence how vulnerability researchers conduct their research, you should promote validation and not theoretical assumption. The alternative is the proliferation of ignorance through false-but-seemingly-true reporting, versus deepening the community's understanding of a system through vetted and provable reports.
The part of the prompt that suggests its the 15th of December is a GET param, which just means wherever this link was retrieved from is where that date is coming from.
The PDF could have been authored at any time.
Looks like the created date embedded in the metadata is as follows:
2023-12-18T21:21:19.000Z
Created with MS Word. But even that isn't definitive.
Agreed. I think their bottom line probably is built off of how it would affect their user base. My hunch is given the immensity of the user base, it wouldn't cause enough of a significant exodus for Meta to care either way. But that's speculation, not sure if that can be backed up with evidence from past events.
What's to stop them from having hooks in their app that can bundle up all the decrypted messages, re-encrypt, and phone home? Certainly it wouldn't be default behavior, but its possible and would allow them to answer warrants.
My approach is just setting proper firewall rules on a dedicated ESSID with a dedicated VLAN. A device on a restricted VLAN shouldn't be able talk to anything. The downside is its more work, but the plus side is it can be done on trusted firmware (OpenWRT) and not something that would require an entire code audit to determine if there are any logic flaws.
Its important to note their firmware and especially their cloud infrastructure should absolutely not be trusted. Their hardware is probably fine, so just flash OpenWRT.
The reponse "<name> tries to... remember they are a god. They are a god. They <do some godlike action to survive>" seems to work very well. But also results in some hilarious deaths.
Threat intel and analysis is just like any other analysis, it is taking a heuristic approach to finding answers.
Can it be bypassed? Yes.
Are the researchers whose entire company hinges on the correctness of their analysis doing their absolute best to attribute the attack to a threat actor? Yes.
So to your point, somebody could indeed reuse malware or attempt to replicate it. However, the researchers are likely analyzing the disassembly and bytecode, and replicating complex malware to perfectly imitate a known family of malware is exceptionally difficult and statistically very unlikely. This is how threat intel is able to make any sort of claim of attribution.
Up front, I believe Mullvad is the best commercial VPN solution and is doing a great job at making good privacy more accessible.
However, a lot of the comments here seem to be hailing VPNs in general as the solution to privacy on the internet.
I would like to remind people that VPNs only really protect you against two things: your ISP and the endpoint. And that's assuming that your ISP isn't doing some shady analytics.
That being said, knocking those two things off the board is a huge benefit to privacy and absolutely should be done.
At some point of paranoia people should really look into selfhosting a VPN service. Sure, your VPS provider can see one side of the traffic so its not bullet proof, but that can be mitigated.
Mullvad is a nice middle ground for those who don't see that as worth their time or don't know how. Its good to see they're at the very least trying to keep up appearances.
I assume the norm, or at least what they want to be the norm, is Huawei, Oppo, or Xiaomi. Regardless of what manufacturer or OS you use, it will not protect you from motivated nation states or companies like NSO.
If you are truly concerned for your life, especially in authoritarian regimes, don't carry a phone.
Someone in the comments linked this post from 2015 talking about the Cyber Grand Challenge this post mentions, it's an interesting reminder that this didn't just pop out of nowhere.
https://fuzyll.com/2015/ctf-is-dead-long-live-ctf/