Entries Tagged "vulnerabilities"

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Legal Restrictions on Vulnerability Disclosure

Kendra Albert gave an excellent talk at USENIX Security this year, pointing out that the legal agreements surrounding vulnerability disclosure muzzle researchers while allowing companies to not fix the vulnerabilities—exactly the opposite of what the responsible disclosure movement of the early 2000s was supposed to prevent. This is the talk.

Thirty years ago, a debate raged over whether vulnerability disclosure was good for computer security. On one side, full disclosure advocates argued that software bugs weren’t getting fixed and wouldn’t get fixed if companies that made insecure software wasn’t called out publicly. On the other side, companies argued that full disclosure led to exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities, especially if they were hard to fix. After blog posts, public debates, and countless mailing list flame wars, there emerged a compromise solution: coordinated vulnerability disclosure, where vulnerabilities were disclosed after a period of confidentiality where vendors can attempt to fix things. Although full disclosure fell out of fashion, disclosure won and security through obscurity lost. We’ve lived happily ever after since.

Or have we? The move towards paid bug bounties and the rise of platforms that manage bug bounty programs for security teams has changed the reality of disclosure significantly. In certain cases, these programs require agreement to contractual restrictions. Under the status quo, that means that software companies sometimes funnel vulnerabilities into bug bounty management platforms and then condition submission on confidentiality agreements that can prohibit researchers from ever sharing their findings.

In this talk, I’ll explain how confidentiality requirements for managed bug bounty programs restrict the ability of those who attempt to report vulnerabilities to share their findings publicly, compromising the bargain at the center of the CVD process. I’ll discuss what contract law can tell us about how and when these restrictions are enforceable, and more importantly, when they aren’t, providing advice to hackers around how to understand their legal rights when submitting. Finally, I’ll call upon platforms and companies to adapt their practices to be more in line with the original bargain of coordinated vulnerability disclosure, including by banning agreements that require non-disclosure.

And this is me from 2007, talking about “responsible disclosure”:

This was a good idea—and these days it’s normal procedure—but one that was possible only because full disclosure was the norm. And it remains a good idea only as long as full disclosure is the threat.

Posted on November 19, 2025 at 7:04 AM • View Comments

Serious F5 Breach

This is bad:

F5, a Seattle-based maker of networking software, disclosed the breach on Wednesday. F5 said a “sophisticated” threat group working for an undisclosed nation-state government had surreptitiously and persistently dwelled in its network over a “long-term.” Security researchers who have responded to similar intrusions in the past took the language to mean the hackers were inside the F5 network for years.

During that time, F5 said, the hackers took control of the network segment the company uses to create and distribute updates for BIG IP, a line of server appliances that F5 says is used by 48 of the world’s top 50 corporations. Wednesday’s disclosure went on to say the threat group downloaded proprietary BIG-IP source code information about vulnerabilities that had been privately discovered but not yet patched. The hackers also obtained configuration settings that some customers used inside their networks.

Control of the build system and access to the source code, customer configurations, and documentation of unpatched vulnerabilities has the potential to give the hackers unprecedented knowledge of weaknesses and the ability to exploit them in supply-chain attacks on thousands of networks, many of which are sensitive. The theft of customer configurations and other data further raises the risk that sensitive credentials can be abused, F5 and outside security experts said.

F5 announcement.

Posted on October 23, 2025 at 7:04 AM • View Comments

Apple’s Bug Bounty Program

Apple is now offering a $2M bounty for a zero-click exploit. According to the Apple website:

Today we’re announcing the next major chapter for Apple Security Bounty, featuring the industry’s highest rewards, expanded research categories, and a flag system for researchers to objectively demonstrate vulnerabilities and obtain accelerated awards.

  1. We’re doubling our top award to $2 million for exploit chains that can achieve similar goals as sophisticated mercenary spyware attacks. This is an unprecedented amount in the industry and the largest payout offered by any bounty program we’re aware of ­ and our bonus system, providing additional rewards for Lockdown Mode bypasses and vulnerabilities discovered in beta software, can more than double this reward, with a maximum payout in excess of $5 million. We’re also doubling or significantly increasing rewards in many other categories to encourage more intensive research. This includes $100,000 for a complete Gatekeeper bypass, and $1 million for broad unauthorized iCloud access, as no successful exploit has been demonstrated to date in either category.
  2. Our bounty categories are expanding to cover even more attack surfaces. Notably, we’re rewarding one-click WebKit sandbox escapes with up to $300,000, and wireless proximity exploits over any radio with up to $1 million.
  3. We’re introducing Target Flags, a new way for researchers to objectively demonstrate exploitability for some of our top bounty categories, including remote code execution and Transparency, Consent, and Control (TCC) bypasses ­ and to help determine eligibility for a specific award. Researchers who submit reports with Target Flags will qualify for accelerated awards, which are processed immediately after the research is received and verified, even before a fix becomes available.

Posted on October 15, 2025 at 7:02 AM • View Comments

Autonomous AI Hacking and the Future of Cybersecurity

AI agents are now hacking computers. They’re getting better at all phases of cyberattacks, faster than most of us expected. They can chain together different aspects of a cyber operation, and hack autonomously, at computer speeds and scale. This is going to change everything.

Over the summer, hackers proved the concept, industry institutionalized it, and criminals operationalized it. In June, AI company XBOW took the top spot on HackerOne’s US leaderboard after submitting over 1,000 new vulnerabilities in just a few months. In August, the seven teams competing in DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge collectively found 54 new vulnerabilities in a target system, in four hours (of compute). Also in August, Google announced that its Big Sleep AI found dozens of new vulnerabilities in open-source projects.

It gets worse. In July Ukraine’s CERT discovered a piece of Russian malware that used an LLM to automate the cyberattack process, generating both system reconnaissance and data theft commands in real-time. In August, Anthropic reported that they disrupted a threat actor that used Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, to automate the entire cyberattack process. It was an impressive use of the AI, which performed network reconnaissance, penetrated networks, and harvested victims’ credentials. The AI was able to figure out which data to steal, how much money to extort out of the victims, and how to best write extortion emails.

Another hacker used Claude to create and market his own ransomware, complete with “advanced evasion capabilities, encryption, and anti-recovery mechanisms.” And in September, Checkpoint reported on hackers using HexStrike-AI to create autonomous agents that can scan, exploit, and persist inside target networks. Also in September, a research team showed how they can quickly and easily reproduce hundreds of vulnerabilities from public information. These tools are increasingly free for anyone to use. Villager, a recently released AI pentesting tool from Chinese company Cyberspike, uses the Deepseek model to completely automate attack chains.

This is all well beyond AIs capabilities in 2016, at DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge. The annual Chinese AI hacking challenge, Robot Hacking Games, might be on this level, but little is known outside of China.

Tipping point on the horizon

AI agents now rival and sometimes surpass even elite human hackers in sophistication. They automate operations at machine speed and global scale. The scope of their capabilities allows these AI agents to completely automate a criminal’s command to maximize profit, or structure advanced attacks to a government’s precise specifications, such as to avoid detection.

In this future, attack capabilities could accelerate beyond our individual and collective capability to handle. We have long taken it for granted that we have time to patch systems after vulnerabilities become known, or that withholding vulnerability details prevents attackers from exploiting them. This is no longer the case.

The cyberattack/cyberdefense balance has long skewed towards the attackers; these developments threaten to tip the scales completely. We’re potentially looking at a singularity event for cyber attackers. Key parts of the attack chain are becoming automated and integrated: persistence, obfuscation, command-and-control, and endpoint evasion. Vulnerability research could potentially be carried out during operations instead of months in advance.

The most skilled will likely retain an edge for now. But AI agents don’t have to be better at a human task in order to be useful. They just have to excel in one of four dimensions: speed, scale, scope, or sophistication. But there is every indication that they will eventually excel at all four. By reducing the skill, cost, and time required to find and exploit flaws, AI can turn rare expertise into commodity capabilities and gives average criminals an outsized advantage.

The AI-assisted evolution of cyberdefense

AI technologies can benefit defenders as well. We don’t know how the different technologies of cyber-offense and cyber-defense will be amenable to AI enhancement, but we can extrapolate a possible series of overlapping developments.

Phase One: The Transformation of the Vulnerability Researcher. AI-based hacking benefits defenders as well as attackers. In this scenario, AI empowers defenders to do more. It simplifies capabilities, providing far more people the ability to perform previously complex tasks, and empowers researchers previously busy with these tasks to accelerate or move beyond them, freeing time to work on problems that require human creativity. History suggests a pattern. Reverse engineering was a laborious manual process until tools such as IDA Pro made the capability available to many. AI vulnerability discovery could follow a similar trajectory, evolving through scriptable interfaces, automated workflows, and automated research before reaching broad accessibility.

Phase Two: The Emergence of VulnOps. Between research breakthroughs and enterprise adoption, a new discipline might emerge: VulnOps. Large research teams are already building operational pipelines around their tooling. Their evolution could mirror how DevOps professionalized software delivery. In this scenario, specialized research tools become developer products. These products may emerge as a SaaS platform, or some internal operational framework, or something entirely different. Think of it as AI-assisted vulnerability research available to everyone, at scale, repeatable, and integrated into enterprise operations.

Phase Three: The Disruption of the Enterprise Software Model. If enterprises adopt AI-powered security the way they adopted continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), several paths open up. AI vulnerability discovery could become a built-in stage in delivery pipelines. We can envision a world where AI vulnerability discovery becomes an integral part of the software development process, where vulnerabilities are automatically patched even before reaching production—a shift we might call continuous discovery/continuous repair (CD/CR). Third-party risk management (TPRM) offers a natural adoption route, lower-risk vendor testing, integration into procurement and certification gates, and a proving ground before wider rollout.

Phase Four: The Self-Healing Network. If organizations can independently discover and patch vulnerabilities in running software, they will not have to wait for vendors to issue fixes. Building in-house research teams is costly, but AI agents could perform such discovery and generate patches for many kinds of code, including third-party and vendor products. Organizations may develop independent capabilities that create and deploy third-party patches on vendor timelines, extending the current trend of independent open-source patching. This would increase security, but having customers patch software without vendor approval raises questions about patch correctness, compatibility, liability, right-to-repair, and long-term vendor relationships.

These are all speculations. Maybe AI-enhanced cyberattacks won’t evolve the ways we fear. Maybe AI-enhanced cyberdefense will give us capabilities we can’t yet anticipate. What will surprise us most might not be the paths we can see, but the ones we can’t imagine yet.

This essay was written with Heather Adkins and Gadi Evron, and originally appeared in CSO.

Posted on October 10, 2025 at 7:06 AM • View Comments

Apple’s New Memory Integrity Enforcement

Apple has introduced a new hardware/software security feature in the iPhone 17: “Memory Integrity Enforcement,” targeting the memory safety vulnerabilities that spyware products like Pegasus tend to use to get unauthorized system access. From Wired:

In recent years, a movement has been steadily growing across the global tech industry to address a ubiquitous and insidious type of bugs known as memory-safety vulnerabilities. A computer’s memory is a shared resource among all programs, and memory safety issues crop up when software can pull data that should be off limits from a computer’s memory or manipulate data in memory that shouldn’t be accessible to the program. When developers—­even experienced and security-conscious developers—­write software in ubiquitous, historic programming languages, like C and C++, it’s easy to make mistakes that lead to memory safety vulnerabilities. That’s why proactive tools like special programming languages have been proliferating with the goal of making it structurally impossible for software to contain these vulnerabilities, rather than attempting to avoid introducing them or catch all of them.

[…]

With memory-unsafe programming languages underlying so much of the world’s collective code base, Apple’s Security Engineering and Architecture team felt that putting memory safety mechanisms at the heart of Apple’s chips could be a deus ex machina for a seemingly intractable problem. The group built on a specification known as Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) released in 2019 by the chipmaker Arm. The idea was to essentially password protect every memory allocation in hardware so that future requests to access that region of memory are only granted by the system if the request includes the right secret.

Arm developed MTE as a tool to help developers find and fix memory corruption bugs. If the system receives a memory access request without passing the secret check, the app will crash and the system will log the sequence of events for developers to review. Apple’s engineers wondered whether MTE could run all the time rather than just being used as a debugging tool, and the group worked with Arm to release a version of the specification for this purpose in 2022 called Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension.

To make all of this a constant, real-time defense against exploitation of memory safety vulnerabilities, Apple spent years architecting the protection deeply within its chips so the feature could be on all the time for users without sacrificing overall processor and memory performance. In other words, you can see how generating and attaching secrets to every memory allocation and then demanding that programs manage and produce these secrets for every memory request could dent performance. But Apple says that it has been able to thread the needle.

Posted on September 23, 2025 at 7:07 AM • View Comments

Time-of-Check Time-of-Use Attacks Against LLMs

This is a nice piece of research: “Mind the Gap: Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use Vulnerabilities in LLM-Enabled Agents“.:

Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-enabled agents are rapidly emerging across a wide range of applications, but their deployment introduces vulnerabilities with security implications. While prior work has examined prompt-based attacks (e.g., prompt injection) and data-oriented threats (e.g., data exfiltration), time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) remain largely unexplored in this context. TOCTOU arises when an agent validates external state (e.g., a file or API response) that is later modified before use, enabling practical attacks such as malicious configuration swaps or payload injection. In this work, we present the first study of TOCTOU vulnerabilities in LLM-enabled agents. We introduce TOCTOU-Bench, a benchmark with 66 realistic user tasks designed to evaluate this class of vulnerabilities. As countermeasures, we adapt detection and mitigation techniques from systems security to this setting and propose prompt rewriting, state integrity monitoring, and tool-fusing. Our study highlights challenges unique to agentic workflows, where we achieve up to 25% detection accuracy using automated detection methods, a 3% decrease in vulnerable plan generation, and a 95% reduction in the attack window. When combining all three approaches, we reduce the TOCTOU vulnerabilities from an executed trajectory from 12% to 8%. Our findings open a new research direction at the intersection of AI safety and systems security.

Posted on September 18, 2025 at 7:06 AM • View Comments

Hacking Electronic Safes

Vulnerabilities in electronic safes that use Securam Prologic locks:

While both their techniques represent glaring security vulnerabilities, Omo says it’s the one that exploits a feature intended as a legitimate unlock method for locksmiths that’s the more widespread and dangerous. “This attack is something where, if you had a safe with this kind of lock, I could literally pull up the code right now with no specialized hardware, nothing,” Omo says. “All of a sudden, based on our testing, it seems like people can get into almost any Securam Prologic lock in the world.”

[…]

Omo and Rowley say they informed Securam about both their safe-opening techniques in spring of last year, but have until now kept their existence secret because of legal threats from the company. “We will refer this matter to our counsel for trade libel if you choose the route of public announcement or disclosure,” a Securam representative wrote to the two researchers ahead of last year’s Defcon, where they first planned to present their research.

Only after obtaining pro bono legal representation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Coders’ Rights Project did the pair decide to follow through with their plan to speak about Securam’s vulnerabilities at Defcon. Omo and Rowley say they’re even now being careful not to disclose enough technical detail to help others replicate their techniques, while still trying to offer a warning to safe owners about two different vulnerabilities that exist in many of their devices.

The company says that it plans on updating its locks by the end of the year, but have no plans to patch any locks already sold.

Posted on September 17, 2025 at 7:05 AM • View Comments

Lawsuit About WhatsApp Security

Attaullah Baig, WhatsApp’s former head of security, has filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that Facebook deliberately failed to fix a bunch of security flaws, in violation of its 2019 settlement agreement with the Federal Trade Commission.

The lawsuit, alleging violations of the whistleblower protection provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act passed in 2002, said that in 2022, roughly 100,000 WhatsApp users had their accounts hacked every day. By last year, the complaint alleged, as many as 400,000 WhatsApp users were getting locked out of their accounts each day as a result of such account takeovers.

Baig also allegedly notified superiors that data scraping on the platform was a problem because WhatsApp failed to implement protections that are standard on other messaging platforms, such as Signal and Apple Messages. As a result, the former WhatsApp head estimated that pictures and names of some 400 million user profiles were improperly copied every day, often for use in account impersonation scams.

More news coverage.

Posted on September 15, 2025 at 7:05 AM • View Comments

Google Project Zero Changes Its Disclosure Policy

Google’s vulnerability finding team is again pushing the envelope of responsible disclosure:

Google’s Project Zero team will retain its existing 90+30 policy regarding vulnerability disclosures, in which it provides vendors with 90 days before full disclosure takes place, with a 30-day period allowed for patch adoption if the bug is fixed before the deadline.

However, as of July 29, Project Zero will also release limited details about any discovery they make within one week of vendor disclosure. This information will encompass:

  • The vendor or open-source project that received the report
  • The affected product
  • The date the report was filed and when the 90-day disclosure deadline expires

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I like that it puts more pressure on vendors to patch quickly. On the other hand, if no indication is provided regarding how severe a vulnerability is, it could easily cause unnecessary panic.

The problem is that Google is not a neutral vulnerability hunting party. To the extent that it finds, publishes, and reduces confidence in competitors’ products, Google benefits as a company.

Posted on August 8, 2025 at 7:01 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.