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Message-ID: <521d0295-6a93-4a28-be55-332d663ec457@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2026 22:18:08 -0500
From: Jacob Bachmeyer <jcb62281@...il.com>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Coordinated Disclosure in the LLM Age
On 4/28/26 09:58, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> As I'm sure is the case for everyone, the projects I work in are under
> a seemingly unending deluge of vulnerability reports from researchers
> using LLMs to mine for security gold in our software. At the same
> time, we see maintainers on our projects relying on LLM-oriented tools
> to develop fixes for vulnerabilities and compose prose for advisories.
>
> While I take a moment to catch my breath, this new Bizarro World we're
> all living in has gotten me thinking about the risks of public LLM
> services to embargoed vulnerability handling workflows and traditional
> coordinated disclosure. The operators of these LLM services are known
> to feed prompts and results back into their training data, presumably
> making it faster and easier for the same information to be found later
> by other users of the same service. Would keeping embargoes short help
> to mitigate related risks of parallel rediscovery or outright
> disclosure to other LLM users? It seems to me that there must be some
> inherent lag in this process, but how much?
The biggest risk is parallel discovery. If an LLM can find a bug for a
whitehat, it can do the same for a blackhat.
> I'm sorely tempted, both due to the increased volume and the risk of
> premature disclosure, to just assume that any vulnerability reported
> as a result of research using an LLM is trivially discoverable by
> others, and give up trying to pretend there's any point to working it
> under embargo.
You are correct here: you should assume that any LLM will give a
similar result to another person who asks a similar question. In other
words, LLM-discovered vulnerabilities should be considered already
publicly known.
> Similarly, it makes sense to me that patch development and descriptive
> prose shouldn't be produced with LLM assistance for any vulnerability
> that is being worked under an embargo.
This is not a problem if, and only if, you only use local LLMs. Use of
cloud LLM services should be assumed to break an embargo---they would be
immensely valuable "watering hole" targets for blackhats if such use
became common.
-- Jacob
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