I interned for the author at 18. I assumed security testing worked like this:
1. Static analysis catches nearly all bugs with near-total code coverage
2. Private tooling extends that coverage further with better static analysis and dynamic analysis, and that edge is what makes contractors valuable
3. Humans focus on design flaws and weird hardware bugs like cryptographic side-channels from electromagnetic emanations
Turns out finding all the bugs is really hard. Codebases and compiler output have exploded in complexity over 20 years which has not helped the static analysis vision. Todays mitigations are fantastic compared to then, but just this month a second 0day chain got patched on one of the best platforms for hardware mitigations.
I think LLMs get us meaningfully closer to what I thought this work already was when I was 18 and didn't know anything.
1. Static analysis catches nearly all bugs with near-total code coverage
2. Private tooling extends that coverage further with better static analysis and dynamic analysis, and that edge is what makes contractors valuable
3. Humans focus on design flaws and weird hardware bugs like cryptographic side-channels from electromagnetic emanations
Turns out finding all the bugs is really hard. Codebases and compiler output have exploded in complexity over 20 years which has not helped the static analysis vision. Todays mitigations are fantastic compared to then, but just this month a second 0day chain got patched on one of the best platforms for hardware mitigations.
I think LLMs get us meaningfully closer to what I thought this work already was when I was 18 and didn't know anything.