I bet that with a slightly looser prompt/harness, the LLM could have found these twin bugs too.
Yet at the same time, I also think that if the human researcher had manually scanned the code, he'd have noticed these bugs too.
FWIW I do think LLMs are great tools for finding vulnerabilities in general. Just that they were visibly not optimally applied in this case.
I think LLMs are great for vulnerability discovery, but you need to not skimp on the legwork and understanding what even you just found there.
They do not get bored like a human but they are trained on human language and replicate the same traits, such as laziness, and expressing boredom or annoyance (even if obviously they do not experience anything at all). It’s actually a lot of effort to get them to engage with things at a deeper level without skipping corners
> This finding was AI-assisted, but began with an insight from Theori researcher Taeyang Lee, who was studying how the Linux crypto subsystem interacts with page-cache-backed data.
There's no question that we live in the world where LLM AI was involved in finding the copy fail vulnerability at this specific time, and it's completely normal for people to see a vulnerability and then look closer and find related vulnerabilities or a deeper root cause, but there's no need to adopt an extreme "without AI LLM we don't find these vulnerabilities" position.
That is a very difficult fact pattern to which to attach the conclusion "LLMs have sabotaged security research" (my paraphrase).
Also I see you jumping around a lot to the defense of LLMs when I don’t think anyone is really attacking them. Maybe cool it a bit.
So like I said, just chill out.