The tools are expensive. One of the major players in the market have really expensive licensing fees. Then the developers all need to be trained on how to use the tools and understand the results. It’s not something they teach effectively in schools.
Software engineering is still kind of new overall.
Apple has a massive information security organization that has pretty intense resources at their disposal.
It seems borderline impossible that there's a tool that they feel would be beneficial but that they're classed out of using by license costs or by staff proficiency.
Which tool specifically are you thinking of that might have found this but wasn't run because of it's very high licensing fees? I work in this field, I'll be familiar with it.
Question was about high licensing fees and which tools I was referring to
I’m not claiming Defensics or OpenText DAST tools are magical “find all kernel vulns” buttons
My point is more that mature fuzzing ecosystems already existed before the recent AI-driven approaches. Protocol fuzzers, syscall fuzzers, coverage-guided fuzzers, sanitizers, dynamic analysis, etc. have all historically found serious kernel bugs
We might just be talking past each other. My question, from upthread, is this: the heyday of AFL was over a decade ago. Every major platform company fuzzes at a scale that I think is difficult for lay practitioners to get their heads around. They contract, quarterly, soup-to-nuts assessments from competing software security companies, who get full source access and are measured against each other by the quality of their findings. They run bounty programs specifically to direct public researcher attention to these exact findings.
Why didn't "mature fuzzing ecosystems" find the vulnerabilities AI is now finding? It's a pretty big gap in the "fuzzing tools already do this" logic!
> Why didn't "mature fuzzing ecosystems" find the vulnerabilities AI is now finding? It's a pretty big gap in the "fuzzing tools already do this" logic!
Because they simply aren’t ran. That’s my entire argument
Claude et al have “skills” that are basically containers of tools. It’s not a huge leap to say that similar tools are in use within these containers or even same. We don’t know.
I work in this field, have done work for some of the vendors we're discussing, and talk daily to security engineers working on these problems at these vendors. You are wrong.
All software assurance tools. Prove they run them (binary analysis, fuzzers, static analysis, etc) and how that differs from what Mythos is doing (which likely is using those tools as skills) along with objective evidence for each
Yeah I'm pretty content to rest my case here. If it's helpful to you to know this, you're wildly wrong here, like "the search bar on this website will show you to be wrong" wrong, but I'll leave it at that.
Assuming Apple has deployed all of these and have invested in the labor/training on how to properly use them.