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> Reduce risk of failure through artificial intelligence. CQL contains an embedded automated theorem prover that guarantees the correctness of CQL programs.

Man, it's a rough environment right now marketing-wise. I don't know if they're contractually obligated to say the funny magic words, but the term AI is nearly entirely meaningless at this point. Akin to saying "behold my mighty calculator app: it prevents divisions by zero through artificial intelligence!"


Huh, I read the pitch differently. As "reduce risk of (failure through artificial intelligence)," not as "(reduce risk of failure) through artificial intelligence."

Maybe that's my bias since that's what I'm working on, but it's a big benefit to have stronger compiler guarantees of correctness so that an LLM can't screw things up as much. No BSing that it works when the compiler requires proof.


I had to read it twice to come to that conclusion. Maybe the prima facie ambiguity is intentional.

It's what we used to call AI back in the 1970s and 1980s which has advanced a whole lot with little awareness. That is, people thought 10,000 rules was a lot of rules in 1998 and now you can work with 10,000,000 rules. And theorem provers, SAT and SMT all got vastly better.

Could you elaborate on what other disclosure models you're referring to? I can't imagine something being "more responsible" for the public than privately notifying the owning party to give them time to fix the issue, before notifying the rest of the world (including malicious actors) about it.

Didn't the original authors end up leaking this before OpenAI fixed it? They gave them a chance, but then had to decide between staying fully silent or publishing the details despite malicious actors learning about it before it was fixed or leaving users in the dark. They chose it was better to warn users and inform malicious actors despite it not being fixed.

>This vulnerability was responsibly disclosed to OpenAI. Despite multiple follow-ups, we received no communication beyond an automated reply to our initial disclosure. OpenAI's documentation fails to describe sensitive capabilities granted to the model (e.g., running privileged scripts) or risks of model manipulation via indirect prompt injection, instead focusing solely on functional limitations and data-handling concerns. As such, we are publishing our findings to enable informed decision-making regarding the risk surface.

That very last sentence was considered justification of putting this knowledge into the wild when OpenAI refused to fix it. So, if we consider it justified with a delay, then we are saying it is acceptable (it is "responsible") to give the information to malicious actors as long as you tried to warn the right party first.

Compare that to two alternatives. Alternative 1 is never disclosing it to the public until fixed. Saying it is never acceptable to let malicious actors know until it is no longer a concern, even though this will mean users are kept in the dark about the risk.

Alternative 2 is to reduce that timeline to 0. Say that users are immediately warned, despite the risks of making it known to bad actors.

So if we are saying the current delay is acceptable, but both a longer and a shorter delay are unacceptable, then why is that? What justifies the current delay, what makes that the responsible one, rather than a shorter or longer window?

>I can't imagine something being "more responsible" for the public than privately notifying the owning party to give them time to fix the issue, before notifying the rest of the world (including malicious actors) about it.

What about ensure they have fixed it, and only considering it responsible to disclose it when fixed (alternative 1)? If it is never fixed, then the bug is never disclosed, because it is not acceptable to tell malicious actors how to exploit a vulnerability? Even evidence of use wouldn't be justified, as publishing this makes all malicious actors aware of it rather than just a subset of them.

And if you disagree and think some window is reasonable, then apply that argument to a slightly shorter window and repeat until either the argument hits some built in limit or reaches a window of 0.


> So it’s not quite as horrible as it sounds.

I don't know about you, but if a random webpage takes 60+ seconds to load, I just close it and choose to never interact with that site again (unless it's my bank, which is a real and annoying occurrence).


At which point it exists solely to punish real human users? What scraper bot is going through checkout?

The credit card tester bots go through the checkout process.

PoW wouldn't be a big issue for them though since their volume is much lower.


The vast majority of Python's AI/ML ecosystem is already written in C/C++ and uses interop glue to call it from Python. But agreed on the transitive dependencies, it's a nightmare


I've seen microkernels mentioned a few times between these LPE posts and I'm curious about why. Would they be fundamentally more secure against forgetting to add bounds checking, or assuming user-provided input buffers should be writable without checking?


Yes, because as a userspace program if you forget to do bounds checking or read the wrong thing, the kernel kills the process. But if the buggy code is the kernel then there’s no protection. Microkernels aim to have as little code as required in kernel space.


> select the previous-to-latest version

For supply chain attacks that simply bide their time, or for dependencies which involve interacting with other subsystems, it's possible you miss a critical security update by doing this. Of course, the maintainers of the crates should yank known bad releases, but that's putting trust in a third-party that may have already been compromised.


You only miss supply chain attacks that are eager to begin exploiting. If everyone begins waiting a week to update dependencies, attackers just need to wait 2 weeks before actively using their attack vectors.


Maintainers attempt to reduce the likelihood of that somewhat by giving security patches boring-sounding commit messages. When there are thousands of patches for every kernel release to sift through, that adds a small barrier for would-be exploiters.


> Presumably npm exempts security updates from its minimum release age

Why would it? Then an attacker would just push compromised code as a "security update". Since the majority of these npm attacks are account-based, the attacker can do everything the actual owner could.


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