The VibeSec Reckoning

(martinfowler.com)

39 points | by HieronymusBosch 2 hours ago

12 comments

  • est 19 minutes ago
    There are basically two kinds of people in the world, ones that create stuff, and ones that destroys stuff.

    Defense is a toally different game, and requires a complete new mindset than creativity. Security is something that you miss one then you lose all.

    AIs are good at choosing a good candidate based on a reward model, but it sucks hard at enumerating mundane attack surfaces and make combinations to exploit through.

    • beardedwizard 6 minutes ago
      Good engineering is good engineering. Belief that someone else uniquely possesses the skill to engineer some critical part of a system you built is, for me, just abdicating responsibility. It's a learned helplessness.

      Someone else blindly operating an llm on a corpus you created with an llm is comical.

  • some_random 1 hour ago
    Something worth noting is that the types of vulnerabilities LLMs introduce are notably different from what humans introduce, way fewer local issues like syntax mistakes, simple memory problems, etc and far more broad issues like authn/authz
  • Foobar8568 1 hour ago
    First so called vulnerability, isn't how a lot platforms are actually built? Share a link/copy a link, and more often than not, I am sure to have read a warning like "anyone with that link may access that file".

    Now should I mention all the screw up I have seen in several Saas 1b+ valuation, including DocuSign/ and more security oriented ones (PIM related etc?).

    For any softwares, you need a minimum critical mindset and experiences that you don't usually see.

  • juancn 40 minutes ago
    It's not just the prompting to avoid issues, you also need to make the AI take an adversarial role and generate a feedback loop.
  • bcjdjsndon 1 hour ago
    Vibe coding into production? You don't need to wait for scientists to produce research to know that's not a great idea.

    You played yaself

    • mountainriver 29 minutes ago
      We do it, it’s fine. From what I can tell just about every company does it now.

      Review your code, have integration tests, rollout feature incrementally with feature flags.

      All the things we previously did for all the really bad human developers which AI is way better than

  • et1337 1 hour ago
    > prompting for test-driven development is not the same as enforcing code coverage thresholds in your build tool

    Are they actually different? I would guess they have roughly the same efficacy. 100% code coverage means nothing, and this is especially true with LLMs.

  • _pdp_ 1 hour ago
    We will learn the hard way... like always.
    • ryanmcbride 7 minutes ago
      More likely we simply won't learn. Or at least, the people in charge won't.
  • comandillos 1 hour ago
    I mean, isn't introducing safety guardrails as part of the system prompt actually a REALLY bad idea? This way you basically fully rely on the model to follow the rule, but its clear that even frontier models like Opus will start ignoring these things after a certain context length...

    In our company we are just running agents inside isolated containers with isolated network access so it cannot even SSH or fuck up anything even if it gets access into it... That's the only and safest way... inconvenient, true, but the only safe option.

    PS: At the same time I've observed this way actually people uses the agent in a more reasonable way, e.g. producing helper scripts to help them with their daily stuff, produce very specific things, create simple PoCs, but they don't commit to vibe-code all the functionality in their corresponding software products.

  • andy_ppp 24 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • huflungdung 1 hour ago
    [dead]
  • adamddev1 1 hour ago
    > "To combat this we need to write a security context file to guide the AI, be cautious with AI permission requests, create a daily security intelligence feed, and provide builders with a secure-by-default harness and templates."

    Edit: To combat this we need to actually write and understand our code.