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by LiamPowell 75 days ago
I agree they found at least some real vulnerabilities. What I think is nonsense is the claim of finding thousands of real critical vulnerabilities and claims that they've found other Linux vulnerabilities that they simply can't exploit.

There are notably no SHA-3 sums for all their out-of-bound write Linux vulnerabilities, which would be the most interesting ones.

2 comments

Sure. I guess it's a question of whether this is the worst they found or a representative case among thousands. It sounds like you'd know better than me, so I'm going to provisionally hope you're right...
Why is that nonsense? Do you think they exhausted all their compute finding just the few big vulnerabilities they've already discussed, and don't have a budget to just keep cranking the machine to generate more?

They're not publishing SHAs for things that aren't confirmed vulnerabilities. They're doing exactly the thing you'd want them to do: they claim to have vulnerabilities when they have actual vulnerabilities.

If I understand Anthropic's statements correctly, they've been cranking for a while, and what they have now is the results of Mythos-enabled vulnerability scans on every important piece of software they could find. (I do want to acknowledge how crazy it is that "vulnerability scan all important software repos in the world" is even an operation that can be performed.)
We talked to Nicholas Carlini on SCW and did not at all get the impression that they've hit everything they can possibly hit. They're still proving the concept one target at a time, last I heard.
which statement, specifically, led you to interpret this claim?
> Over the past few weeks, we have used Claude Mythos Preview to identify thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities (that is, flaws that were previously unknown to the software’s developers), many of them critical, in every major operating system and every major web browser, along with a range of other important pieces of software.

They don’t explicitly rule out, I suppose, that these were only limited partial scans they did to find the vulnerabilities. But I don’t know why they’d do it that way, it’s not like they don’t have the resources to scan the entire Linux kernel.

i was trying to map "vulnerability scan all important software repos in the world" to an actual quote on their writing, but "every major operating system and every major web browser, along with a range of other important pieces of software" is not the same.
Important to understand it's not one-and-done; you can't "Mythos" Chrome and then put a checkmark next to it. It's a continuous process.