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stonepresto | 9 months ago

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.

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seanheelan|9 months ago

Hi, author here. Yes, I built a PoC. Yes, it triggered a KASAN report/crash.

stonepresto|9 months ago

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

lyu07282|9 months ago

Are you saying you want PoCs that trigger a crash from the use-after-free or you would only be satisfied by full on RCE PoCs?

stonepresto|9 months ago

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.