Software security heavily favors the defenders (ex. it's much easier to encrypt a file than break the encryption). Thus with better tools and ample time to reach steady-state, we would expect software to become more secure.

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justincormack 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Software security heavily favours the attacker (ex. its much easier to find a single vulnerability than to patch every vulnerability). Thus with better tools and ample time to reach steady-state, we would expect software to remain insecure.

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pants2 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If we think in the context of LLMs, why is it easier to find a single vulnerability than to patch every vulnerability? If the defender and the attacker are using the same LLM, the defender will run "find a critical vulnerability in my software" until it comes up empty and then the attacker will find nothing.

Defenders are favored here too, especially for closed-source applications where the defender's LLM has access to all the source code while the attacker's LLM doesn't.

	▲	dist-epoch 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You also need to deploy the patch. And a lot of software doesn't have easy update mechanisms. A fix in the latest Linux kernel is meaningless if you are still running Ubuntu 20.

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conradkay 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That generally makes sense to me, but I wonder if it's different when the attacker and defender are using the same tool (Mythos in this case)

Maybe you just spend more on tokens by some factor than the attackers do combined, and end up mostly okay. Put another way, if there's 20 vulnerabilities that Mythos is capable of finding, maybe it's reasonable to find all of them?

	▲	conradkay an hour ago \| parent [-]
		From the red team post https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/ "Most security tooling has historically benefitted defenders more than attackers. When the first software fuzzers were deployed at large scale, there were concerns they might enable attackers to identify vulnerabilities at an increased rate. And they did. But modern fuzzers like AFL are now a critical component of the security ecosystem: projects like OSS-Fuzz dedicate significant resources to help secure key open source software. We believe the same will hold true here too—eventually. Once the security landscape has reached a new equilibrium, we believe that powerful language models will benefit defenders more than attackers, increasing the overall security of the software ecosystem. The advantage will belong to the side that can get the most out of these tools. In the short term, this could be attackers, if frontier labs aren’t careful about how they release these models. In the long term, we expect it will be defenders who will more efficiently direct resources and use these models to fix bugs before new code ever ships. "

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fsflover 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is only true if your approach is security through correctness. This never works in practice. Try security through compartmentalization. Qubes OS provides it reasonably well.

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tptacek 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think this is broadly true and to the extent it's true for cryptographic software, it's only relatively recently become true; in the 2000s and 2010s, if I was tasked with assessing software that "encrypted a file" (or more likely some kind of "message"), my bet would be on finding a game-over flaw in that.

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intended 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This came across as so confident that I had a moment of doubt.

It is most definitely an attackers world: most of us are safe, not because of the strength of our defenses but the disinterest of our attackers.

	▲	Herring 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There are plenty of interested attackers who would love to control every device. One is in the white house, for example.