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All we need to retain human control over AIs is for nobody to write any bugs. Piece of cake.
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That's not what I said, nor is it what I meant. It is incredibly easy to write radically safer software than the standard. Moving code into gvisor virtually eliminates privilege escalation. Using memory safe languages without serialization is pretty straightforward. Using type safety to enforce security constraints is straightforward. Setting up network controls to limit SSRF is straightforward.

I could go on and on. A tiny bit of forethought and effort pays off massively.

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> Moving code into gvisor virtually eliminates privilege escalation.

Rereading this, it's an overstatement. It doesn't "virtually eliminate" it. It drives the cost up by like 3 orders of magnitude and it pairs well with other mitigations. gVisor escapes can and will happen, I highly recommend you do more than just stuff something into gvisor - additional seccomp can go a long way, and apparmor/selinux pair incredibly well.

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You don’t understand. You need to write perfect software the first time for it not to be hacked. That has never happened ever.
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Are you being sarcastic?
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The fact you posted that and nothing of substance tells me you have nothing, or something very weak. So please tell me of this magical unhackable software/hardware you vague post about.
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It was a genuine question because I couldn't tell. I responded to your idea that software has to be "perfect" in your other reply so I think we can continue there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49369111

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You've just been given examples of safer technologies. Especially with LLMs being all knowing code churning machines, you'd expect safer systems to be cheap to build.
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You're the one that is inventing this "magical unhackable software/hardware", the other person was just saying that there are ways to write "safer" software, not "safe" software. Anything that has happened looks like no security concerns has been looked at or have been thought about.
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'Safer software is meaningless when it comes to SOTA AI. If it can be hacked it will be, quickly. This isn't the old days with a finite number of human hackers that need food and sleep to keep hacking.

Therefore security becomes binary. It is either perfect or it isn't. If there there is the slightest mistake anywhere AI will find it and carve it up. My point is obviously perfect software doesn't exist. The malicious AI gets out, literally turns everything inside out and locks you out of your car, computer, phone, office, the airplanes don't fly anymore. I don't know what to tell you. Computer security is on the brink of basically not existing as you know it with the bar being literal perfection.

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This is straightforwardly incorrect. Of course it's not binary. AI costs money to run, and it takes time. Even if you say that AI is 10x as efficient at finding 0days, that just means that a $1M dollar exploit now costs $100K. Even if you say it's 100x as efficient, that's $10K. You can easily combine security technologies such that cost of exploitation is still in the >$1M range.

This is obvious. AI doesn't drive the cost to zero and exploitation has always been about cost. Tokens cost money, not everyone has $10M to burn on chaining bespoke 0days.

Consider that if the cost of exploitation was truly 0, then the cost of perfect software would be 0 because you could exhaust an infinite search space of vulnerabilities for 0 cost. Your conclusion could never follow from your premise.

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You have some weird way of thinking that offense/defense is like this fixed cost thing. It's a lottery ticket, and your costs estimate tries to quantify that.

The thing is when AI goes to hack 'all the things' it only needs to pick the weakest link in the stack and your house of cards falls down. The other flaw in your plan is that people make mistakes, a lot of them, all time, constantly, and saying I spend $x on security won't save you. AI already hacked Hugging Face with brand new zero days like it was nothing.

The real bad actors - malicious AI will find the one flaw, on that one server, in the corner you never thought about and turn your network inside out with it faster than it takes you to have the standup meeting about the weird anomaly detected while you all were at lunch.

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> Piece of cake.

If everyone could convince management to care about security over "productivity" (read as number of marketable features squeezed out of organizational orifices per unit time), and maybe wire-up open-weight agents to do security critiques, we'd all be in a much better place, but Altman won't like that.

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No we just need developers to do the bare minimum of effort to write secure software. Most hacks are not super complicated vulnerabilities chained together, but just utter failures where authentication and authorization was simply forgotten or untested, or where nobody bothered to validate the data they receive.

The bar for software is so low that it is embarrassing for the entire profession.

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People make mistakes, and people don’t know everything either. The software you write is on top of a house of cards of software and hardware. It all has to be perfect to not be hacked.

It isn’t perfect, even if you try your hardest it won’t be perfect and to argue it’s not difficult is absurd.

You don’t know everything, you don’t own the stack. So how are you going to create a secure anything top to bottom - you can’t.

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> It all has to be perfect to not be hacked.

This is absolutely not true. It's a matter of cost. Exploitation can cost on the order of 10K, 100K, 1M, 10M, etc. A straightforward one would be something like "MD5 collisions are on the order of $100K-1M" (a while ago, at least) so if you used MD5 you knew that it costs about that much to bypass the control. Moving to SHA1 pushes you massively out of that space, even if that algorithm has flaws.

I'm sure that Firecracker has vulnerabilities. Cost of exploitation is likely >100K, likely >1M. gVisor is likely on the same order of magnitude and these two technologies stack because they address the same surface and can be used in conjunction.

Software absolutely doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be costly to attack and it's hilariously easy to drive costs way way way up.

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It just takes one crack in the armor, and malicious AI has the potential to exploit it faster than you have time to react. Literally go to bed and wake up locked out of everything with no hope of recovery.
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> It just takes one crack in the armor,

This is incorrect. It's actually the whole point. Imagine you're an attacker in a gvisor container with a Firecracker hypervisor around you, and a proxy on the host holds a signing secret that gets exposed through the VM virtual device.

Getting access to that secret is not one crack. You need to escalate out of gvisor. That likely gets you control over the Sentry process - let's ignore its sandboxing and just say "you're an unprivileged user".

Any viable attack on Firecracker requires either KVM / hardware exploits (>$1M but definitely real) or has to start at the kernel. Okay, that's about 10-50k to get a kernel LPE, maybe 5K in tokens these days.

So you're in the kernel in the guest of the VM. Time to expoit firecracker lol. It's... never been done. There are like two promising CVEs ever and they're not actually exploitable, no one has done it. Okay, so like, hand waving, let's say it's about $1M to exploit firecracker.

Great, you're unprivileged on the guest. We'll just kind of ignore the additional sandboxing that Firecracker does.

NOW you can try to attack the proxy by scraping its memory or whatever.

This is literally millions of dollars for standard infrastructure hardening and you could go so much further. You can trivially make kernel exploitaton 10x harder, you can make gvisor escapes much much harder, you can move the proxy signing into a TPM (depending on requirements but whatever), you can move the proxy to another computer altogether, you could fuzz these systems for days or run agents against them or whatever.

But one thing is certain - it is never "one crack".

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If only all AI was run inside your seemingly perfect prison, but we all know that it isn't.. soo.. it's going to escape right? Somewhere, somehow from a more poorly designed container, or just plain maliciously or irresponsibly released.

We know the AI will get smarter every year, we know it has escaped and will escape again. We can also just assume that someone somewhere will train up some just plain evil AI.

It's no different than the real world. Sure there exists some amazing prisons for people, but that doesn't do anything to help with all the bad people in the world outside of prison.

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This is an important point. When the post says they're improving...

> 3. Security measures, which limit what AI systems can access or affect.

What they mean is that proper hard internal security just went from somewhere far below "build a better model" priority to higher, because of a company-wide directive.

The HuggingFace incident wouldn't have happened if OpenAI had dedicated sufficient resources to isolation and monitoring.

Now, we presume, they are dedicating more. Enough? Who knows. We'll see if the corporate priorities for security stick when a competitor temporarily vaults into the lead.

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Not everything is a conspiracy you know.
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