flawedworld | @[email protected]

A random person on the internet interested in InfoSec and NatSec.

Tweets are my own and do not reflect my employers views.

Engagement is not endorsement.

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

AI has made serious offensive exploitation child's play. You should rightfully be scared at how trivial it is now to achieve RCE across a multitude of systems. What will you do to adjust your way of life to mitigate this? Now is a better time than ever to review your posture.

[Joshua J. Drake @jduck]

Guess who has two thumbs, hasn't willingly used PHP since 2001 (except to write exploits), and always tells people not use it. Yep.

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

@jduck PHP is banned at my current org for a reason lol, as is Electron and a host of other items.

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

@never_released Most cursed thing I've seen is Rockchip's NPU driver recently.

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

HAHAHAHAHHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

‼️ Palo Alto firewall VMs and Citrix NetScaler run without ASLR, a basic memory defence, Kevin Beaumont says.

He warns that makes the PHP2Shell flaws trivial to exploit through internet-facing management interfaces.

Neither has a patch out. Citrix promises one on 27 October.

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

Maybe we should be looking at serious, hardware attestations, that prove Root CAs are being generated and stored in community approved HSMs. I can see a future where this gets enforced by root programs, but it doesn't fix the very broken nature of WebPKI either way.

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

Its funny seeing how conversations about multi tenanted hypervisors not being able to truly isolate tenants due to hardware side channels are now becoming common due to AI , when anyone who has seriously been in that area has known this for years.

[Hillel @hillelogram]

It is a weird weird year to be a formal methods expert.

Some unorganized thoughts on the new @AnthropicAI and @theoremlabs post on formal verification (https://t.co/YoymKXYFJa):

- This is very cool.

- The main innovation is verifying a later stage of the program. Normally provers take the source code, LLM it into a theorem language, and then prove that, which means you have to make assumptions about source semantics and compilation properties. It's very easy to make a mistake in translating and prove the wrong thing!

What they instead do is compile the code into assembly, and then (if I understand this correctly), compile that assembly into a theorem language (which they call LPS). So as long as the compiler is faithful you can skip the whole divergence problem.

- I'm glad they clarify that you still have to trust the translation process, the "hardware, OS, OCaml" compiler, the LPS model, and also assume that the program is single threaded with fixed memory. The single biggest source of errors in formally verified code is when the proof assumes something that isn't true in practice. It's really, really important to state your assumptions!

- I'm not clear why they need to compile the fuzzer into the theorem. Is it to act as a description of valid inputs and workload? Maybe to embed assertions in as theorems?

- Holy crap, 180 million lines of Rocq. Is that more Rocq than exists in the world already? I notice they say a 600,000 line proof corresponds to roughly 20k CPU instructions. That would be like, 1-2k lines of source code at most? Really goes to show how inefficient this approach is and how it only works because you can throw LLMs at the problem.

- This, probably deliberately, doesn't address the single biggest gap in AI-based verification: AIs cannot come up with good properties. Doesn't matter if you're doing unit testing, property testing, formal verification. I always assumed this was a "frontier labs haven't trained for it yet" thing, but if Anthropic hasn't talked about that here, maybe they've tried and haven't been successful yet. That's interesting to me.

Instead, they take a known universal property (this code doesn't crash or get flagged by UBsan) and prove that instead. Still very useful, but makes it harder to generalize to proving arbitrary things about arbitrary programs.

- Anybody reading the official post should also read their expert review appendix (https://t.co/qQU0E0nJwW). It points out some interesting things, like the fact that most of the code the LLM wrote wasn't used in the proof (over one billion lines of Rocq), that they had to prove the equivalence between fuzzed and unfuzzed programs, and (this is most interesting), some experiments find that the LLM-method of proofwriting may not scale to more complex things.

- Also read the description of LPS (https://t.co/hRTCL05X0H) to understand the limitations of the assembly -> Rocq compilation. In particular, it does not handle concurrency at all (which is one of the main use cases for formal methods!) or OS signals. Also it can't prove things about program arguments with slash characters, meaning they can prove stuff about `rm foo` but not `rm foo/bar`.

- The official skill (https://t.co/weDOdmJUfO) doesn't tell us much about the nature of FM and AI. Probably too much for me to hope of any skill.

- Some of the article's specific caveats and throat clearings make me think someone at Anthropic reads my stuff ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

@CreepNTech Not MTK :) A wise man once said "You can get root on MediaTek by breathing on it"

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

Lol should I drop 3 BootROM 0days now and follow the trend? :)

(Nothing to do with Pixels before people start to freak out)

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

@Cememer_luna Yeah you'll be able to have a lot of fun with this one. They aren't the first OEM/ODM to have screwups like this and won't be the last sadly.

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

@vqtska @GrapheneOS It is used to workaround git limitations on GitHub ever since Google changed how they drop kernel sources. It is also used for prebuilt content again due to git limitations at GitHub.

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

@CreepNTech Probably usual suspects, Synopsys, Samsung, etc. Haven't looked much at ISP or NPU blocks but NPUs are on the way out anyway as their capabilities get rolled into GPUs, and loads of NPUs are just modifications of NVDLA IP or very use case specific.

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

If someone were to give me a few million USD I will make an ARM SoC that you want to buy, with modern IP blocks , MTE, an Opentitan RoT and a formally verified BootROM. And that's just the start....

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

@4ld0r1thms CHERI is still only ARMv8 AFAIK, but would be very interested in it being incorporated into a modern design (but that's now going to need someone to port it to current gen cores, if ARM hasn't already).

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

@CreepNTech If only we were higher up in the same org :)

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

Can confirm this is real lmao

[Bad Pote @bad_pote]

La vérité, c’est comme ça maintenant.

[LaurieWired @lauriewired]

Say what you will about Windows (OS), but the NT kernel really is an engineering marvel that still puts Linux to shame in many ways.

The quickest way to describe it for a programmer, is NT was more like an object-oriented language, with a strong security model from day one, whereas Linux is very…not.

A lot of the “good” features in Linux feel bolted-on (SELinux, Capabilities, Namespaces) because…well they were. I love to imagine an alternate history where NT won.

IMO, Microsoft *should* have made an “Open NT” in the early 2000s; not fully GPL-style open, but one where a large org could say…swap out a memory allocator for their own. (they sorta did this with limited source access, but it was too restrictive)

You could imagine say…an early Amazon forking OpenNT to create an “AmazonNT” for EC2, where they have a modified scheduler, network stack, whatever. But, the security+compatibility contract keeps a stable baseline on the Microsoft side.

Controversial take, but if we enter this era where users are giving AI agents increasingly higher levels of access control; the Linux kernel is legitimately a poor fit. Think about it; answer the question “What exactly is this AI agent allowed to do?”

On Standard Linux, it’s disgustingly messy with lots of overlap.

Do you use UIDs? GIDs? ACLs? CGROUPs? Policies? SELinux? Filesystem modes? There’s not a singular coherent graph of capabilities you can point to. Too many ways you can escape an initially narrow scope.

NT, by comparison, can go the route of explicitly typed resources, and then you could have these really strong centralized audit trails when an agent goes haywire…etc.

I know I’m rambling, but the point is…if you were greenfielding an OS kernel from scratch, in 2026, with the intent of being forward-looking, it would *not* look like Linux. Frankly, it’d probably look a lot closer to NT, or even a BSD fork…

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

@DylangerDaly @ZynOpsII @never_released Basically everything has some form of OTP these days, even on x86_64. The main use cases for it on Pi are setting up secure boot, disabling JTAG, and you have juuust enough user controllable area where you could store an ECDSA key or a key for disk encryption.

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

@DylangerDaly @ZynOpsII @never_released You can dump the OTP storage via the VideoCore Mailbox, and you can unlock access to the more sensitive OTP regions in RPIBOOT mode where you can setup secure boot or disable JTAG

[flawedworld | @[email protected] @flawedworlddev]

@DylangerDaly @ZynOpsII @never_released I've studied this on the CM4. They have a factory provisioned area of OTP memory which stores the board RAM size on it. It also indicates if the board shipped with a WiFi chip or not. I do not believe there is a way to deal with this, even in RPIBOOT mode.