outloudvi

I agree with the opinion that people should treasure every moment, and live as if they only have 100 days of life, that is: to have fun, to try things, to explore anything they are interested in etc.. The LLM horror, no matter unfake or not, won't change anything for a people thinking this way.

Just go /yolo :D

If people want to apply this mechanism, it shall be not much of a hassle for writers of most (modern) programming languages, as they mostly have some `src/` directory (maybe also some `tests/`) that contains all source codes for a quick `git add`.

For Golang users, I dunno...

Went through the comment page and found this comment that explains well on most of the popular opinions. Thank you, hennell!

I agree cooldown is not harmful in general. What I intended to say is that people (mostly) only know a security company is not trustable because they once failed to detect a malware package, and the reason people know a package is malware is that it has caused damaged to at least someone.

I agree that LLM does not (and believe it never) fully replace researchers, but it produces artifacts (e.g. writeups, PoCs) at a cheaper price.

That makes me think LLM impacts human researchers' rewards, but now I realized the result might actually go in the opposite direction according to Jevons paradox. People still need experienced and professional human security researchers after all.

After reading the comments I now agree a short-length cooldown (maybe 1 or 3 days) is beneficial, given the following assumptions:

- Independent security companies are scanning the packages (be careful if the project is depending on some no-so-popular packages)

- Maintainers react promptly (it would be nonsense if people need to cooldown for 21 days because people may have 21-day vacations)

Sorry! That's 100% on me failing to make the analogy understood.

Shall have thought about that... but I'm playing too many Unity games recently.

Thanks for your explanation on the definition of "security theater"!

> But if it turns out they can’t serve as the cooldown vanguard, then we have great evidence that they shouldn’t be trusted at all.

If they cannot serve as the cooldown vanguard, we are indeed going to realize they are not trustable, but by the time the damage has already been done. Therefore, if companies want to prevent the damage as much as possible, I believe they should do the scan by themselves.

I applaud you if you do setup automated security scanners, without counting on external security groups or individuals (that doesn't have a security contract with your company).

This post is based on an assumption from what I see (I would be very happy if it's wrong) that most companies do not event bother to do these scans. They are merely waiting for the free kindness.

> The idea of not moving quickly to new software versions has been around for decades.

There are COBOL users and CentOS 6 users. They aren't affected by this issue.

They might need to face another set of issues like vulnerability backporting and so on. People not worrying about cooldowns might still need to patch their log4j libraries, but that's another thing. This post is not for them.

> There are always early adopters and researchers looking at new, publicly available software.

I agree with that. These hacks are very unlikely to go unnoticed, especially for popular packages (although they do happen; `chalk` has 3M downloads per week when it was hacked).

> The observation that "if everyone in production has a cooldown, the benefit is gone" is an absolutist opinion.

Yes. However, I think this is eventually becoming some type of pointless arms race, as cooldown does not act actively towards reducing ecosystem attacks.

To add a somehow random example, pnpm's default cooldown time is 1 day. Yarn's 7 days. I'm not sure whether one day pnpm would also change it to 7 days because of people asking.

I think it's great if people actually use LLM for the analysis. I did mention it in the solution part in the post:

> Run LLM-assisted audit on vendored code.

I also believe sandboxing will get more and more important. There might be some trade-off on user experience or convenience, but given the security enhancement and (LLM agent's) freedom I think it will be well worth it.

I do appreciate these security companies a lot (for example, Snyk), but I feel it hard to believe this is sustainable. Especially in the current world where LLM is devaluing security researchers' work. If they cannot get enough fiat or credit, this will eventually turn to some incident like OpenSSL heartbleed or so.