I agree cooldown is not harmful in general. What I intended to say is that people (mostly) only know a security company is not trustable because they once failed to detect a malware package, and the reason people know a package is malware is that it has caused damaged to at least someone.
I agree that LLM does not (and believe it never) fully replace researchers, but it produces artifacts (e.g. writeups, PoCs) at a cheaper price.
That makes me think LLM impacts human researchers' rewards, but now I realized the result might actually go in the opposite direction according to Jevons paradox. People still need experienced and professional human security researchers after all.
Thanks for your explanation on the definition of "security theater"!
> But if it turns out they can’t serve as the cooldown vanguard, then we have great evidence that they shouldn’t be trusted at all.
If they cannot serve as the cooldown vanguard, we are indeed going to realize they are not trustable, but by the time the damage has already been done. Therefore, if companies want to prevent the damage as much as possible, I believe they should do the scan by themselves.
I applaud you if you do setup automated security scanners, without counting on external security groups or individuals (that doesn't have a security contract with your company).
This post is based on an assumption from what I see (I would be very happy if it's wrong) that most companies do not event bother to do these scans. They are merely waiting for the free kindness.
> The idea of not moving quickly to new software versions has been around for decades.
There are COBOL users and CentOS 6 users. They aren't affected by this issue.
They might need to face another set of issues like vulnerability backporting and so on. People not worrying about cooldowns might still need to patch their log4j libraries, but that's another thing. This post is not for them.
> There are always early adopters and researchers looking at new, publicly available software.
I agree with that. These hacks are very unlikely to go unnoticed, especially for popular packages (although they do happen; `chalk` has 3M downloads per week when it was hacked).
> The observation that "if everyone in production has a cooldown, the benefit is gone" is an absolutist opinion.
Yes. However, I think this is eventually becoming some type of pointless arms race, as cooldown does not act actively towards reducing ecosystem attacks.
To add a somehow random example, pnpm's default cooldown time is 1 day. Yarn's 7 days. I'm not sure whether one day pnpm would also change it to 7 days because of people asking.
I also believe sandboxing will get more and more important. There might be some trade-off on user experience or convenience, but given the security enhancement and (LLM agent's) freedom I think it will be well worth it.
I do appreciate these security companies a lot (for example, Snyk), but I feel it hard to believe this is sustainable. Especially in the current world where LLM is devaluing security researchers' work.
If they cannot get enough fiat or credit, this will eventually turn to some incident like OpenSSL heartbleed or so.
These companys don't care about the reputation of their domains anymore at the moment they start to send spams. However, email senders (SendGrid, Mailgun etc.) care about the reputation of their IP addresses.
I usually check the "Received" header and report to the email service provider. Once in a while I receive a response saying the case is properly handled.
These providers are the only ones that care about their reputation and thus may take some action. Investors? Nope.
> Is there good public discussion on root expiration?
Haven't seen a specific one but I guess the most relavant public discussion on root CA-led device bricking issues might have occurred around the time when DST Root CA X3 (naturally) expired - that's around September '24: https://letsencrypt.org/2023/07/10/cross-sign-expiration.htm...
I personally believe most issues blocking old device reuse can be solved by manufacturers returning the root permission back to users, so that users can install modded systems with up-to-date stuffs. However, it's a pity that manufacturers aren't willing to do it, as it hurts their interest on selling new devices. Will laws on "right to repair" work? Time will tell.
I'm worried about the situation when Dark Patterns are not widely recognized enough as a malicious practice for users.
Half a month ago I see someone on Twitter defending its own product design as "transparent and nothing hidden" - the "$0 now, then $15/month in 14 days" description where all text after "$0" are small and in grey. I don't think it maintains trust between the product and users, and thus it doesn't seem like a good thing.
Vercel has a fairly generous free quota and a non-negligible high pricing scheme - I think people still remember https://service-markup.vercel.app/ .
For the crawl problem, I want to wait and see whether robots.txt is proved enough to stop GenAI bots from crawling since I confidently believe these GenAI companies are too "well-behaved" to respect robots.txt.