[HN Gopher] Claude wrote a full FreeBSD remote kernel RCE with r...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Claude wrote a full FreeBSD remote kernel RCE with root shell
        
       Author : ishqdehlvi
       Score  : 234 points
       Date   : 2026-04-01 05:21 UTC (17 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | PunchyHamster wrote:
       | I'm just gonna assume it was asked to fix some bug and it wrote
       | exploit instead
        
       | magicalhippo wrote:
       | Key point is that Claude did not _find_ the bug it exploits. It
       | was given the CVE writeup[1] and was asked to write a program
       | that could exploit the bug.
       | 
       | That said, given how things are I wouldn't be surprised if you
       | could let Claude or similar have a go at the source code of the
       | kernel or core services, armed with some VMs for the try-fail
       | iteration, and get it pumping out CVEs.
       | 
       | If not now, then surely not in a too distant future.
       | 
       | [1]: https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-
       | SA-26:08...
        
         | fragmede wrote:
         | > Credits: Nicholas Carlini using Claude, Anthropic
         | 
         | Claude was used to _find_ the bug in the first place though.
         | That CVE write-up happened because of Claude, so while there
         | are some very talented humans in the loop, Claude is quite
         | involved with the whole process.
        
           | magicalhippo wrote:
           | > Claude was used to find the bug in the first place though.
           | That CVE write-up happened because of Claude
           | 
           | Do you have a link to that? A rather important piece of
           | context.
           | 
           | Wasn't trying to downplay this submission the way, the main
           | point still stands:
           | 
           |  _But finding a bug and exploiting it are very different
           | things. Exploit development requires understanding OS
           | internals, crafting ROP chains, managing memory layouts,
           | debugging crashes, and adapting when things go wrong. This
           | has long been considered the frontier that only humans can
           | cross.
           | 
           | Each new AI capability is usually met with "AI can do Y, but
           | only humans can do X." Well, for X = exploit development,
           | that line just moved._
        
             | jsnell wrote:
             | > Do you have a link to that? A rather important piece of
             | context.
             | 
             | It was a quote from your own link from the initial post?
             | 
             | https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-
             | SA-26:08...
             | 
             | > Credits: Nicholas Carlini using Claude, Anthropic
        
               | magicalhippo wrote:
               | Oh wow, blind as a bat.
               | 
               | Would have been interesting with a write-up of that, to
               | see just what Claude was used for.
        
               | jsnell wrote:
               | Obviously no guarantees that it's exactly what was done
               | in this case, but he talked about his general process
               | recently at a conference and more in depth in a podcast:
               | 
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sd26pWhfmg
               | 
               | https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2026/03/25/ai-
               | bug-f...
               | 
               | It pretty much is just "Claude find me an exploitable
               | 0-day" in a loop.
        
           | bayindirh wrote:
           | Yes, that claim needs a source.
        
         | petcat wrote:
         | > have a go at the source code of the kernel or core services,
         | armed with some VMs for the try-fail iteration, and get it
         | pumping out CVEs.
         | 
         | FreeBSD kernel is written in C right?
         | 
         | AI bots will trivially find CVEs.
        
           | pjmlp wrote:
           | The Morris worm lesson is yet to be taken seriously.
        
             | pitched wrote:
             | We're here right now looking at a CVE. That has to count as
             | progress?
        
         | Cloudef wrote:
         | You can let agent churn unattended if you have some sort of
         | known goal. Write a test that should not pass and then tell the
         | agent to come up with something that passes the test without
         | changing the test itself.
         | 
         | For this kind of fuzzing llms are not bad.
        
           | vinnymac wrote:
           | When doing this remove write permissions on the test file, it
           | will do a much better job of staying the course over long
           | periods. I've been doing this for over a year now.
        
         | ogig wrote:
         | Setting up fuzzing used to be hard. I haven't tried yet, but my
         | bet is having Claude Code, today, analyze a codebase and
         | suggest where and how to fuzztest it and having it review the
         | crashes and iterate, will produce CVEs.
        
           | zer00eyz wrote:
           | It has access to more testing data than I will ever look at.
           | Letting it pull from that knowledge graph is going to give
           | you good results! I just built a chunk of this (type of
           | thinking) into my (now evolving) test harness.
           | 
           | 1. Unit testing is (somewhat) dead, long live simulation.
           | Testing the parts only gets you so far. These tests are far
           | more durable, independent artifacts (read, if you went from
           | JS to rust, how much of your testing would carry over)
           | 
           | 2. Testing has to be "stand alone". I want to be able to run
           | it from the command line, I want the output to be wrapper so
           | I can shove the output on a web page, or dump it into an API
           | (for AI)
           | 
           | 3. Messages (for failures) matter. These are not just simple
           | what's broken, but must contain enough info for context.
           | 
           | 4. Your "failed" tests should include logs. Do you have
           | enough breadcrumbs for production? If not, this is a problem
           | that will bite you later.
           | 
           | 5. Any case should be an accumulation of state and behavior -
           | this really matters in simulation.
           | 
           | If you have done all the above right and your tool can return
           | all the data, dumping the output into the cheapest model you
           | can find and having it "Write a prompt with recommendations
           | on a fix (not actual code, just what should be done beyond
           | "fix this") has been illuminating.
           | 
           | Ultimately I realized that how I thought about testing was
           | wrong. Its output should be either dead simple, or have
           | enough information that someone with zero knowledge could
           | ramp up into a fix on their first day in the code base. My
           | testing was never this good because the "cost of doing it
           | that way" was always too high... this is no longer the case.
        
           | rsync wrote:
           | "... having Claude Code, today, analyze a codebase and
           | suggest where and how to fuzztest it ..."
           | 
           | I recently directed chatgpt, through the web interface, to
           | create a firefox extension to obfuscate certain HTTP queries
           | and was denied/rebuffed because:
           | 
           | "... (the) system is designed to draw a line between privacy
           | protection and active evasion of safeguards."
           | 
           | Why would this same system empower fuzzing of a binary (or
           | other resource) and why would it allow me to work toward
           | generating an exploit ?
           | 
           | Do the users just keep rephrasing the directive until the
           | model acquiesces ? Or does the API not have the same training
           | wheels as the web interface ?
        
             | ogig wrote:
             | This very question was asked to Nicholas Carlini from
             | Anthropic at this talk:
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sd26pWhfmg
             | 
             | The answer is complex, worth watching the video. But
             | mainly, they don't know where to place the line. Defenders
             | need tools, as good as attackers. Attackers will jailbreak
             | models, defender might not, it's the safeguard positive in
             | that case? Carlini actively asks the audience and community
             | for "help" in determining how to proceed basically.
        
           | xfalcox wrote:
           | Our CEO did that at our company and found 33 CVEs. Rails also
           | did that and found 7 or 8.
        
             | AugSun wrote:
             | ... get ready for RIF soon.
        
         | muskstinks wrote:
         | You might want to watch this:
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sd26pWhfmg
         | 
         | Claude is already able to find CVEs on expert level.
        
           | shimman wrote:
           | A talk given by an employee that stands to make millions from
           | Anthropic going public, definitely not a conflict of interest
           | by the individual.
        
             | muskstinks wrote:
             | I didn't say "watch this without critical thinking".
             | 
             | The chance this is completly fabricated though is very low
             | and its an highly interesting signal to many others.
             | 
             | There was also a really good AI CTF Talk at 39c3 hacker
             | conference just 4 month ago.
        
               | ale wrote:
               | But you did say "Claude is already able to find CVEs on
               | expert level."
        
               | muskstinks wrote:
               | Please also read my comments with critical thinking and
               | add my comment and its content to your own list of
               | signals you trust :P
        
               | ale wrote:
               | Haha alright good point
        
             | pama wrote:
             | It is by the individual who (also with Claude) found the
             | specific vulnerability used in this exploit.
        
           | Bender wrote:
           | _Claude is already able to find CVEs on expert level._
           | 
           | Does it fix them as fast as it finds them? _Bonus if it adds
           | snarky code comments_
        
             | snovv_crash wrote:
             | I'm more interested if it fixes CVEs faster than it
             | introduces them.
        
               | Bender wrote:
               | That too. Honestly I am expecting that if AI is such the
               | wonder-miracle that people act like it is that it should
               | be able to spot complex back-doors that require multiple
               | services that look benign when red teamed but when used
               | in conjunction provide the lowest CPU ring access along
               | with all the obfuscated undocumented CPU instructions and
               | of course all the JTAG debugging functions of all the
               | firmware.
        
           | dloss wrote:
           | Carlini gives some more background about his vulnerability
           | research with Claude in this interview by tptacek & co.
           | https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2026/03/25/ai-
           | bug-f...
        
         | Foobar8568 wrote:
         | Look at Xbow which spawned a few "open source" competitors.
        
         | cryptbe wrote:
         | >Key point is that Claude did not find the bug it exploits.
         | 
         | It found the bug man. You didn't even read the advisory. It was
         | credited to "Nicholas Carlini using Claude, Anthropic".
        
           | magicalhippo wrote:
           | I admit I missed that line, as I was expecting a more direct
           | attribution of AI work.
           | 
           | I haven't been able to find a write-up on the bug finding,
           | and since the advisory didn't contain any details at all,
           | it's unclear to me if Claude was just used to proof read the
           | submission, actively used to help find the bug, or if it
           | found it in a more autonomous way.
        
         | mentalgear wrote:
         | it' s called brute force .
        
           | Isamu wrote:
           | Everything with LLM-style AI is brute force. I don't think
           | people care, unless there's a new data center going in next
           | door that's incredibly resource inefficient .
        
           | margalabargala wrote:
           | Brute force might be dismissed as "not elegant" but it's
           | highly effective. _Especially_ for bypassing security.
           | 
           | If you need to access someone's account or decrypt their hard
           | drive, brute force is an effective way to do it.
        
         | wslh wrote:
         | While it's great to clarify, LLMs are actually finding bugs and
         | writing exploits [1][2]. There are more example though.
         | 
         | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47589227
         | 
         | [2] https://xbow.com/
        
           | giancarlostoro wrote:
           | Another great example is how Claude is helping Mozilla find
           | zero day exploits in Firefox, by the hundreds, and ranging
           | from minor to CVE level, for over a year:
           | 
           | https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/hardening-firefox-
           | anthro...
           | 
           | I think the Mozilla example is a good one because its a large
           | codebase, lots of people keep asking "how does it do with a
           | large codebase" well there you go.
        
             | wslh wrote:
             | And you can check the list of bugs being discovered by
             | Anthropic's Red Team: https://red.anthropic.com/
        
         | lateforwork wrote:
         | > _get it pumping out CVEs._
         | 
         | Is that a good thing or bad?
         | 
         | I see that as a very good thing. Because you can now
         | inexpensively find those CVEs and fix them.
         | 
         | Previously, finding CVEs was very expensive. That meant only
         | bad actors had the incentive to look for them, since they were
         | the ones who could profit from the effort. Now that CVEs can be
         | found much more cheaply, people without a profit motive can
         | discover them as well--allowing vulnerabilities to be fixed
         | before bad actors find them.
        
           | cogman10 wrote:
           | It's good and bad.
           | 
           | Not all CVEs are the same, some aren't important. So it
           | really depends on what gets founds as a CVE. The bad part is
           | you risk a flood a CVEs that don't matter (or have already
           | been reported).
           | 
           | > That meant only bad actors had the incentive to look for
           | them
           | 
           | Nah. Lot's of people look for CVEs. It's good resume fodder.
           | In fact, it's already somewhat of a problem that people will
           | look for and report CVEs on things that don't matter just so
           | they can get the "I found and reported CVE xyz" on their
           | resume.
           | 
           | What this will do is expose some already present flaws in the
           | CVE scoring system. Not all "9"s are created equal. Hopefully
           | that leads to something better and not towards apathy.
        
             | evanmoran wrote:
             | It also depends on if the CVEs can be fixed by LLMs too. If
             | they can find and fix them, then it's very good.
        
               | cogman10 wrote:
               | Fixing isn't often a problem for CVEs. The hard part is
               | almost always finding the CVE in the first place.
               | 
               | There are some extreme cases that might require extensive
               | code changes, and those would benefit from LLMs. But a
               | lot of the issues are things like off by one issues with
               | pointers.
        
           | rtkwe wrote:
           | The biggest question is can you meaningfully use Claude on
           | defense as well, eg can it be trusted to find and fix the
           | source of the exploit while maintaining compatibility.
           | Finding the CVEs helps directly with attacks while only
           | helping defenders detect potential attacks without the second
           | step where the patch can also be created. If not you've got a
           | situation where you've got a potential tidal wave of CVEs
           | that still have to be addressed by people. Attackers can use
           | CVE-Claude too so it becomes a bit of an arms race where you
           | have to find people able and willing to spend all the money
           | to have those exploits found (and hopefully fixed).
        
         | themafia wrote:
         | They tried. It didn't work that well:
         | 
         | https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/
        
           | joe_mamba wrote:
           | How did you managed to get it to do that? When I gave it
           | instructions to use Ghidra MCP to look for vulnerabilities in
           | a windows driver on my local machine it refused saying it's
           | not allowed to do pentest activities even if sandboxed to
           | your own device.
        
             | tonyarkles wrote:
             | Not who you were asking and not explicitly looking for
             | vulnerabilities... I have gotten a ton of mileage from
             | getting Claude to reverse engineer both firmware and
             | applications with Ghidra and radare2. My usual prompt
             | starts with "Here's the problem I'm having [insert
             | problem]. @foo.exe is the _installer for the latest
             | firmware update_. Extract the firmware and determine if
             | there's a plausible path that could cause this problem.
             | Document how you've extracted the firmware, how you've done
             | the analysis, and the ultimate conclusions in @this-
             | markdown-file.md"
             | 
             | I have gotten absolutely incredible results out of it. I
             | have had a few hallucinations/incorrect analyses (hard to
             | tell which it was), but in general the results have been
             | fantastic.
             | 
             | The closest I've come to security vulnerabilities was a
             | Bluetooth OBD-II reader. I gave Claude the APK and asked it
             | to reverse engineer the BLE protocol so that I could use
             | the device from Python. There was apparently a ton of
             | obfuscation in the APK, with the actual BLE logic buried
             | inside an obfuscated native code library instead of Java
             | code. Claude eventually asked me to install the Android
             | emulator so that it could use https://frida.re to do
             | dynamic instrumentation instead of relying entirely on
             | static analysis. The output was impressive.
        
           | tptacek wrote:
           | Sorry, can you clarify what you're saying here? What didn't
           | work that well?
        
             | themafia wrote:
             | Letting Claude get at the source code to try to find CVEs.
             | I found it particularly entertaining that after finding
             | none it just devolved to a grep for "strcat."
        
               | tptacek wrote:
               | Oh, I see. No, you're wrong. That's absolutely not what
               | it did and not at all an accurate way to sum up what it
               | found.
               | 
               | This isn't a complete rebuttal to your argument but I'll
               | note with irony that we're commenting on a thread about a
               | FreeBSD kernel remote that Claude both found and wrote a
               | reliable exploit for (though people will come out of the
               | woodwork to say that reliable exploitation of FreeBSD
               | kernel remotes isn't much of a flex).
               | 
               | Here, from the exact tranche of vulnerabilities you're
               | saying was just a "grep for strcat", are the Firefox
               | findings:
               | 
               | https://www.mozilla.org/en-
               | US/security/advisories/mfsa2026-1...
               | 
               | We're getting to a point, like we did with coding agents
               | last year, where you can just say "I believe my lying
               | eyes". Check out a repository and do Carlini's "foreach
               | FILE in $(sourcefiles); <run claude -p and just ask for
               | zero days starting from that file>". I did last night,
               | and my current dilemma is how obligated I am to report
               | findings.
        
               | themafia wrote:
               | It's from the link I posted. Claude's own team in January
               | trying to do exactly what you suggested and ending with
               | results that are less than promising. It's their blog. I
               | assumed it represented the pinnacle of their research.
               | 
               | We're getting a point where anecdotes are being used in
               | place of reason. I'd think you want to ask "how many bug
               | bounties are earned by humans vs AI assistants?" If
               | there's money to be made in finding 0-days then shouldn't
               | there be ample evidence of this?
        
               | tptacek wrote:
               | You can see now that you assumed wrong.
        
       | rithdmc wrote:
       | Running into a meeting, so won't be able to review this for a
       | while, but exciting. I wonder how much it cost in tokens, and
       | what the prompt/validator/iteration loop looked like.
        
       | fragmede wrote:
       | https://github.com/califio/publications/tree/main/MADBugs/CV...
       | would have been a better link
        
         | tln wrote:
         | Or even better, the blog post.
         | 
         | https://blog.calif.io/p/mad-bugs-claude-wrote-a-full-freebsd
         | 
         | But I found the exploit writeup pretty interesting
        
       | m132 wrote:
       | Appreciate the full prompt history
        
         | ptx wrote:
         | Well, it ends with "can you give me back all the prompts i
         | entered in this session", so it may be partially the actual
         | prompt history and partially hallucination.
        
           | dboreham wrote:
           | fwiw you can dump the actual session in a format suitable to
           | be posted on the web with this tool:
           | https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/25/claude-code-
           | transcript...
        
         | dark-star wrote:
         | they read like they were done by a 10 year old
        
           | addandsubtract wrote:
           | Welcome to vibe coding. If you ever lurk around the various
           | AI subreddits, you'll soon realize just how bad the average
           | prompts and communication skills of most users are.
           | Ironically, models are now being trained on these 5th-grade-
           | level prompts and improving their success with them.
        
             | _alternator_ wrote:
             | Just think about how your parents used google when you were
             | a kid. What got better results faster?
        
               | nunez wrote:
               | we were taught google search query syntax by our
               | librarian when I was in high school in 2002-ish. so...
        
           | m132 wrote:
           | They do, the whole tone and the lack of understanding of
           | Docker, kernel threads, and everything else involved make it
           | sound hilarious at first. But then you realize that this is
           | all the human input that led to a working exploit in the
           | end...
        
             | bluGill wrote:
             | Freebsd doesn't have docker. It has jails which can serve a
             | similar purpose but are not the same in important ways
        
               | m132 wrote:
               | Please at least read the context before attempting to
               | correct me...
               | 
               | Here's what I'm referring to: https://github.com/califio/
               | publications/blob/7ed77d11b21db80...
        
               | nozzlegear wrote:
               | God damn, how much time am I wasting by writing full
               | paragraphs to the Skinner box when I could just write
               | half-formed sentences with no punctuation or grammar?
        
               | thwarted wrote:
               | > _can we demon strait somehow a unpriv non root user_
               | 
               | "demon strait". Was this speech to text? That might
               | explain the punctuation and grammar.
        
               | Daishiman wrote:
               | It's amazing what an intelligence that has infinite
               | patience can do to understand barely comprehensible
               | gibberish.
        
               | johnisgood wrote:
               | Now give an excuse for pushing so hard for docker on
               | FreeBSD.
        
               | bluGill wrote:
               | I'm not correcting you, I'm adding context for people who
               | don't know much about freebsd.
        
       | panstromek wrote:
       | The talk "Black-Hat LLMs" just came out a few days ago:
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sd26pWhfmg
       | 
       | Looks like LLMs are getting good at finding and exploiting these.
        
         | baq wrote:
         | Everybody is acts so surprised as if nobody (around here of all
         | places!) read the sama tweet in which he was hiring the Head of
         | Preparedness... in December.
         | 
         | https://xcancel.com/sama/status/2004939524216910323
        
           | eru wrote:
           | I never read any Twitter.
        
             | baq wrote:
             | X was the primary source, it's been since reported all over
             | the news.
        
           | muskstinks wrote:
           | Besides that i'm not reading x, what has this arbitary random
           | tweet todo with antrophic, the yt talk about Opus quality
           | Jump to find exploits no one else was able to find so far?
           | 
           | A theoretical random tweet and a clear demonstration are two
           | different things.
        
       | ptx wrote:
       | > _It 's worth noting that FreeBSD made this easier than it would
       | be on a modern Linux kernel: FreeBSD 14.x has no KASLR (kernel
       | addresses are fixed and predictable) and no stack canaries for
       | integer arrays (the overflowed buffer is int32_t[])._
       | 
       | What about FreeBSD 15.x then? I didn't see anything in the
       | release notes or the mitigations(7) man page about KASLR. Is it
       | being worked on?
       | 
       | NetBSD apparently has it: https://wiki.netbsd.org/security/kaslr/
        
         | keysersoze33 wrote:
         | This is more of a Linux kernel criticism of KASLR, but perhaps
         | it's related as to why it's not been a priority in FreeBSD
         | (i.e. it gives a false sense of safety and rather focus on
         | 'proper' security hardening):
         | https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/truth-about-linux-4-6-sec...
        
           | pixl97 wrote:
           | Security is an onion, honestly you want both layers to be as
           | hard as possible.
        
         | ktm5j wrote:
         | I don't understand this, because KASLR has been default in
         | FreeBSD since 13.2:
         | 
         | [kmiles@peter ~]$ cat /etc/os-release
         | 
         | NAME=FreeBSD
         | 
         | VERSION="13.3-RELEASE-p4"
         | 
         | VERSION_ID="13.3"
         | 
         | ID=freebsd
         | 
         | ANSI_COLOR="0;31"
         | 
         | PRETTY_NAME="FreeBSD 13.3-RELEASE-p4"
         | 
         | CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:freebsd:freebsd:13.3"
         | 
         | HOME_URL="https://FreeBSD.org/"
         | 
         | BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.FreeBSD.org/"
         | 
         | [kmiles@peter ~]$ sysctl kern.elf64.aslr.enable
         | 
         | kern.elf64.aslr.enable: 1
        
           | savant2 wrote:
           | This knob isn't KASLR, it just enables ASLR for ELF binaries.
        
       | sheepscreek wrote:
       | I find it more concerning that this is still considered
       | newsworthy. Frontier LLMs in the hands of anyone willing to learn
       | and determined can be a blessing or curse.
        
       | dheerajmp wrote:
       | You do not need Claude for finding FreeBSD vulns. Just plain
       | eyes. Pick a file you can find one.
        
       | dnw wrote:
       | Thanks for sharing the prompts:
       | https://github.com/califio/publications/blob/main/MADBugs/CV...
        
         | stek29 wrote:
         | the prompts show how this was a back-and-forth with a lot of
         | nudging, interruptions and steering: it's not Claude writing a
         | full exploit just from a vulnerability description.
        
       | alcor-z wrote:
       | The MADBugs work is solid, but what's sticking with me is the
       | autonomy angle -- not just finding a vuln but chaining multiple
       | bugs into a working remote exploit without a human in the loop.
       | FreeBSD kernel security research has always been thinner on the
       | ground than Linux, which makes this feel both more impressive and
       | harder to put in context. What's the actual blast radius here --
       | is this realistically exploitable on anything with default
       | configs, or does it need very specific conditions?
        
         | Fnoord wrote:
         | FTA, top:
         | 
         | > Attack surface: NFS server with kgssapi.ko loaded (port
         | 2049/TCP)
         | 
         | Not sure who would run an internet exposed NFS server. Shodan
         | would know.
        
           | sitkack wrote:
           | You also need a valid Kerberos ticket to get to the point
           | where you can exploit.
        
         | astrange wrote:
         | This post is AI slop.
        
       | htx80nerd wrote:
       | Another Claude glazing spam post. Can I get paid to post these?
       | What is the URL to sign up for the Claude Glazing affiliate
       | program?
        
       | EGreg wrote:
       | This requires an SSH to be available?
       | 
       | Is it possible to pwn without SSH listening?
        
         | fragmede wrote:
         | *NFS
        
           | bink wrote:
           | One of the exploits writes a public key to the
           | authorized_keys file, so it does require SSH be open as well.
        
       | stephc_int13 wrote:
       | The most difficult part is always to find the vulnerability, not
       | to fix it. And most people who are spending their days finding
       | them are heavily incentivized to not disclose.
       | 
       | Automatic discovery can be a huge benefit, even if the transition
       | period is scary.
        
         | spookie wrote:
         | Hopefully such automation also covers fixing instead of giving
         | open source devs headaches, like the one over some obscure
         | codec from the 90's _.
         | 
         | Nevertheless, attacking is a targeted endeavour, unlike
         | defense. Fixing is, in _general_, more difficult in theory.
         | 
         | * reference to past google and ffmpeg incident_
        
       | neonstatic wrote:
       | > "Claude wrote"
       | 
       | I am hoping that quite soon we will have general acceptance of
       | the fact that "Claude can write code" and we will switch focus to
       | how good / not good that code is.
        
         | abcde666777 wrote:
         | Read my mind. I want to see what it got right and wrong,
         | whether it's an absolute mess or actually maintainable over
         | time, etc.
        
       | andrewstuart wrote:
       | Errrr the headline makes it sound like a bad thing.
       | 
       | This is what Claude is meant to be able to do.
       | 
       | Preventing it doing so is just security theater.
        
       | jdurban wrote:
       | the finding vs exploiting distinction matters a lot here. writing
       | an exploit for a documented CVE is a well-scoped task - the
       | vulnerability is defined, the target is known. what's harder to
       | quantify is the inverse - the same model writing production code
       | that introduces new vulnerabilities it could also theoretically
       | exploit. the offensive capability is visible and alarming. the
       | code generation risk is distributed quietly across every PR it
       | opens, which is why the second problem gets less attention.
        
         | samtheprogram wrote:
         | As mentioned elsewhere, while this writeup is about exploiting
         | the RCE, Claude was separately used to find and document this
         | specific RCE.
        
           | jdurban wrote:
           | that makes the second point stronger then - if the same model
           | can find, document and exploit a kernel vulnerability, the
           | question of what it introduces when writing production code
           | becomes harder to dismiss. the capability is symmetric. the
           | visibility isn't.
        
       | decidu0us9034 wrote:
       | I could see that being an incremental time save (perhaps not
       | worth the token spend except for the dev team, not a high-value
       | bug). But nbody finds this kind of bug "by hand" and hasn't for a
       | long time now. Do people here really care about kernel security
       | or testing automation? They're just talking about it because
       | Claude? Everything on HN is people doing unpaid promotional work
       | for Anthropic, just talking about all the promise Claude holds
       | and all the various ways you could be spending more money on
       | Claude. bored aimless vibes.
        
       | tptacek wrote:
       | Calif (Thai Duong's firm) did a writeup on this, which should
       | probably be the link here; it includes the prompts they used:
       | 
       | https://blog.calif.io/p/mad-bugs-claude-wrote-a-full-freebsd
       | 
       | A reminder: this bug was also _found_ by Claude (specifically, by
       | Nicholas Carlini at Anthropic).
        
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