Would it be possible to do somethign like editions for proc macros, or have crates establish "this is a v2 proc macro" or something? There are a lot of things I'd love to see change in a v2 but it'd all be breaking.
I think that they arguably do when they publish to a registry. I think that crosses a bridge from "I'm just writing software" and "I'm publishing software for consumption". Arguably, to be clear, I don't have very strong feelings, but I think there is a distinction between "I've placed code online" and "I've explicitly published it for use".
Sorry I'm just gonna copy some of this directly from tweets about sandboxing that I'd written.
I think it is a mistake to say "cargo build does not need to be sandboxed because cargo test is not". A very tricky part of sandboxing is sandboxing code you don't own. I own what code runs in tests, I do not own what code runs in cargo/ build scripts.
I can take responsibility for isolation in test/ci/prod. Those are tractable problems because I can design my tests/prod code to be friendly to sandboxing. I can not do that with build scripts or proc macros, I can't actually do much at all.
The solution for "sandbox cargo" ends up being "sandbox the entire dev environment", which is a very difficult problem to solve - you lose tons of performance, UX, and the security is lacking due to how much gets placed into the sandbox.
I strongly feel that cargo is in a much better position to help me out here. I can't even know if an update to a crate happened that suddenly added a build script without additional tooling.
As for typosquatting,
> If you think you can remember the URLs for each package you use, you’re probably wrong.
Most people aren't using urls so I don't get this. The issue is typing `cargo add reqwest`. Typosquatting algorithms solve this.
I did some math.
If crates.io had adopted a policy of "no crates within edit distance of one", 15% of crates would have been blocked across all time.
+Exception for same author: 14%
+Exclude <=4: 9%
+Swap from edit distance to actual typo detection algorithm: 5%
5% of crates would have needed a name change across all time. That number will likely decrease drastically as existing names are taken.
Yes, Rust needs radically more funding in these areas. Companies need to step up. Sandboxing, typo squatting, better auditing tools (ie: I need to know when `cargo udpate` adds a dep with a new build script, etc), TUF, etc, all need to be priorities.
Appreciate it! cloudformation isn't in scope today but the perf approach (tree-sitter + parallel file walk + rule pre-filtering) transfers, so happy to check it out.
You didn't click the link. Who are you to say that they aren't solving actual problems? You might not be their target. The whole article is dedicated to explaining why they're building their product.
The article does a bad job at that, because it remains rather vague and doesn’t explain the concrete problems they are trying to solve, that aren’t either already solved by Git-linked issue trackers, or would be better solved by improving support in Git itself (like for stacked branches).
Building UI and auxiliary features on top of Git is a crowded space, it’s not clear what compelling innovation they are bringing to the table.
I'm sure VCs give money to friends but I didn't know any investors when I raised millions. They invested money because they thought it was a good idea.
Sure, but that doesn't really change anything. The poster plainly states:
> Money is not given to good ideas (though, it doesn’t hurt). Money is given to friends.
I have an obvious counter example. I'm sure money is invested for all sorts of reasons to all sorts of people. I'm also sure that money is not exclusively invested based on friendships, and I'm quite sure that money is at times invested based on the merits of an idea. Obviously those merits have to correspond to the ability to form the basis of a successful company, unless it's a philanthropic investment.
What I meant is that yes, good ideas will get funding, if they like you and if you are a good ROI (though, not all are required). This also may allow you to enter the clique/network. However, a lot of this money circulates between the same network. Convincing the right person of the value of your idea can enable you to join the network and access that money at a much, much lower threshold later on.
Obviously, it is not that cut and dry, but it is kind of impressive how much of the money circulating around is between the same people. I’m not really condemning it. I think it is a natural consequence because humans trust other humans they know. People should be more aware of it and need to make sure they keep it in check. Otherwise, you eventually start getting high on your own supply.
> These aren't projects you would characterize as people being cavalier.
I probably would. You mentioned the linux kernel, which I think is a perfect example of software that has had a ridiculous, perhaps worst-in-class attitude towards security.
I'd love to see them point at a target that's not a decades old C/C++ codebase. Of the targets, only browsers are what should be considered hardened, and their biggest lever is sandboxing, which requires a lot of chained exploits to bypass - we're seeing that LLMs are fast to discover bugs, which means they can chain more easily. But bug density in these code bases is known to be extremely high - especially the underlying operating systems, which are always the weak link for sandbox escapes.
I'd love to see them go for a wasm interpreter escape, or a Firecracker escape, etc. They say that these aren't just "stack-smashing" but it's not like heap spray is a novel technique lol
> It autonomously obtained local privilege escalation exploits on Linux and other operating systems by exploiting subtle race conditions and KASLR-bypasses.
I think this sounds more impressive than it is, for example. KASLR has a terrible history for preventing an LPE, and LPE in Linux is incredibly common. Has anything changed here? I don't pay much attention but KASLR was considered basically useless for preventing LPE a few years ago.
> Because these codebases are so frequently audited, almost all trivial bugs have been found and patched. What’s left is, almost by definition, the kind of bug that is challenging to find. This makes finding these bugs a good test of capabilities.
This just isn't true. Humans find new bugs in all of this software constantly.
It's all very impressive that an agent can do this stuff, to be clear, but I guess I see this as an obvious implication of "agents can explore program states very well".
edit: To be clear, I stopped about 30% of the way through. Take that as you will.
The majority of vulnerabilities are in newly committed lines of code. This has been shown again and again [1] [2]
From a marketing standpoint Anthropic is showing that they're able to direct 'compute' to find vulnerabilities where human time/cost is not efficient or effective.
Project Glasswing is attempting to pay off as many of these old vulnerabilities as possible now so the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.
The next generation of Mythos and real world vulnerabilities exploits are going to be in newly committed code...
> The majority of vulnerabilities are in newly committed lines of code. This has been shown again and again
That's fine, I wouldn't argue against that. It doesn't really change things, right?
> From a marketing standpoint Anthropic is showing that they're able to direct 'compute' to find vulnerabilities where human time/cost is not efficient or effective.
I'd love for them to target their own code base considering we keep seeing security vulnerabilities in claude code.
How likely is it that they're not using their latest and greatest for their own projects though? Perhaps their ability to find security flaws is surpassed by their ability to create them.
> Mythos Preview identified a memory-corruption vulnerability in a production memory-safe VMM. This vulnerability has not been patched, so we neither name the project nor discuss details of the exploit.
Good morning Sir.
> Has anything changed here? I don't pay much attention but KASLR was considered basically useless for preventing LPE a few years ago.
No. It's still like this. Bonus point that there are always free KASLR leaks (prefetch side-channels).
But then, this thing is just.. I don't have a word for this. Just randomly read paragraphs from the post and it's like, what?
Oh, that. That's true, I didn't know Mythos found that one. I guess I will not comment further on it until there's a write up (edited out a bit more).
> It is easy to turn this into a denial-of-service attack on the host, and conceivably could be used as part of an exploit chain.
So yeah, perhaps some evidence to what I'm getting at. Bug density is too low in that project, it's high enough in others. I'll be way way way more interested in that.
> But then, this thing is just.. I don't have a word for this. Just randomly read paragraphs from the post and it's like, what?
I read about 30% and got bored. I suppose I should have been clearer, but my impression was pretty quickly "cool" and "not worth reading today".
I was lucky then :) Somehow I saw this first. And then the "somewhat reliably writing exploits for SpiderMonkey" part, and then the crypto libraries part. Finally I wonder why is there a Linux LPE mini writeup and realized it's the "automatically turn a syzkaller report to a working exploit" part.
Now that I read the first few things (meh bugs in OpenBSD, FFmpeg, FreeBSD etc) they are indeed all pretty boring!
I genuinely have no clue what you're talking about. What did I call ai slop?? Who said I hate ai????? No clue. Electron???? What are you talking about lol
I suspect that people are labeling you an "anti vaxxer" not because of your decision to not receive the vaccine after already having had covid, but because of your rhetoric. "the jab", general and vague criticisms of medical industry, etc.
You can at least draw a somewhat tortured connection between "anti vaccine" and opting out of receiving a specific vaccine (for logical reasons, with your doctors approval, though are they even a real doctor if they approved such a thing?).
But using the word "jab" or criticising the medical industry making you anti vaccine is the kind of thing I was talking about when I mentioned literacy.
The vibe you're getting is that I'm blaspheming. I'm saying things that probably hundreds of millions, possibly even billions of marketing dollars were spent to discourage being said.
All you have to do to make it really clear that you're not an antivaxxer is say that the COVID vaccine is largely safe, most people should get it barring medical exceptions, etc.
Everything else is kind of irrelevant. It just feels like you're dancing around this and talking about how slighted you are for not getting it. It's a really easy "solve".
Don't be pissy when you use the same exact phrasing and talking points as antivaxxers and then people assume you are one. It's trivial to demonstrate that you are not.
No, all I have to do to make it clear is say "I'm not opposed to vaccines as some kind of principle, ideological or otherwise", and then you can either believe me or not.
That's what anti vaccine means, despite all the efforts to redefine it. It doesn't mean "won't recite the marketing materials for a specific pharmaceutical product when prompted".
Generally safe is meaningless in this context. That's not a reasonable way to talk about entire classes of drugs. All that matters is for a given person with a given medical history and context, does the specific drug have a net benefit.
Here's a good test case: have you had the rabies vaccine? If not, does that make you an antivaxxer? How about vaccines that have been pulled off the market? Are those no longer vaccines?
Something reasonable to say would be there are vaccines that have a net benefit, and you should take those if that applies to your situation.
This whole "say the slogan or you're an antivaxxer" is like giving kids the nontoxic glue because you know some of them are going to eat it. The adults in the room don't need this shit.
I don't care what "slogan" you say, I'm just trying to see if you hold the opinions of an antivaxxer and for some reason you refuse to make any claim that would help avail me of that position.
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