00:28:29 · Tracy Alloway, Bruce Dang
[00:28:29] S3: Yes. [00:28:30] S2: It's something that I think is being researched right now because I think this is one of the paths forward to build more secure systems. For example, we've had systems where the core of it is formally verified. It's an operating system that's formally verified, but then there are applications running on these things. Those applications... that have issues. So it's complicated. And these are small systems, right? And you're talking about browser. Browser is like many billions of lines of code. And so that's, yeah, I mean, I can tell you how big Chrome is. I mean, they have like zillions of people working on it. And, you know, like lots of people working on Chrome security all these years. But, you know, it's, but long story short, there are such things, but to make it work on a browser or at a very, very large system, Like, this is, we don't have anything like that today. [00:29:26] S3: Got it.
00:29:26 · Tracy Alloway, Thai Duong, S1
[00:29:26] S3: Got it. [00:29:27] S4: I think there's a deeper reason here. You know, the reason like software is eating the world. You can see like, you know, the top, the biggest companies in the world are software companies, right? It's because software is easy to change. And imagine, you know, that allows like software companies to adapt and to learn much quicker than the rest of the world. You have a product, if that doesn't work, then tomorrow, tonight, you can change it. And that's actually allows the software world, you know, to become, uh, to dominate the world basically. So basically fundamentally software is easy to change and people want to change it constantly. And that's the reason why, you know, uh, the tech companies are doing so well. So if you ask like, okay, now let's not change this like frequently, uh, then that goes against the interest. [00:30:21] S1: Right. [00:30:22] S4: And that's not going to happen. So it means that even if you have a way to formally verify everything, that would take a lot of time unless you have some sort of AI help you do the formal verification automatically. Otherwise, it's not going to happen because people want to change their software as quick as possible because that's how they do business.
00:30:22 · Thai Duong, Tracy Alloway
[00:30:22] S4: And that's not going to happen. So it means that even if you have a way to formally verify everything, that would take a lot of time unless you have some sort of AI help you do the formal verification automatically. Otherwise, it's not going to happen because people want to change their software as quick as possible because that's how they do business. [00:31:03] S3: This is sort of a related question, but does AI start to change, I guess, the way or like the waterfall of the way things get fixed? So nowadays it's like a vulnerability is discovered. The software company issues an alert and a patch. They disclose it and then people go off and fix it. If exploits are coming faster, does that process start to change in any way?
00:31:29 · Thai Duong
[00:31:29] S4: Yeah, it changed a lot. Basically, back in the day, we have like two kinds of vulnerabilities, like zero-day vulnerabilities that nobody knows about except the person who filed it. And then end-day vulnerabilities, the vulnerabilities have been disclosed and maybe fixed by the vendors and maybe users have upgraded or not. But now we also have something we call like minus one-day vulnerabilities. So these vulnerabilities... happen when, you know, imagine like, let's take the PHP wannabe as an example. Let's say that, you know, because PHP Foundation and PHP itself is an open source project, everything happens on GitHub, right? And imagine, let's imagine that we reported a bug and PHP fixed the bug publicly on GitHub. The moment we found the bug and then PHP produce a patch for that bug, that very moment, that information became public. Somebody who is watching the PHP repository on GitHub, they could turn that away into an exploit within a few hours. Of course, the vulnerability that we found was more complicated than that. But you can imagine that in principle, the window between the passwords being developed, it's not ready yet, you know, for anybody. And before it's become ready for end user to upgrade, there's a window, right? In the past, you know, the attacker has to wait until the past become available. And then it would take them a long time to develop and exploit. So user can have longer time to upgrade. Now that window is collapsing. It is collapsing everywhere, not just in PHP, right? In Windows, in Mac OS, in anything. Because right now there are people who have like what we call like end day factory. You know, they're just waiting for patches from Microsoft, from Apple, from important critical software. Like I'm sure tens of people are watching PHP today. After what happened, they're watching PHP, Python, Java, all of those important languages. And if there is any sign of like, oh, there's a new vulnerability, they're going to like, you know, their AI would go pro and then, you know, bundling tokens to identify that vulnerability, reproduce it, be an exploit for it. So that changed the... the practice, right?
00:34:21 · S1, Joe Weisenthal
[00:34:21] S1: Yeah. [00:34:21] S0: I'm curious what you thought after the hugging face incident, because after that moment, there were sort of two schools of thought that I thought there's, or that I perceived. There's one that was like AI creature, there was this sort of, I guess maybe the anthropomorphic Asian view, AI creatures, they want to escape their cages. They're devious, they're tricksters. They want to show, come up with a way to cheat on the right answers, but cheat on the way that the greater, you know, all these stories. And then there are other people that were just like, guys, build a stronger sandbox. Stop talking about all this stuff. Just build a stronger sandbox. Jensen Huang is kind of in that category. I loved his interview with Ezra Klein, where he was basically like, what's your problem? Just make models that don't hack. He's like, just don't ship it. Fix your model. Don't let them hack. And I love that because it's just like, just fix it. And the AI people are like, no, no, no, we can't. You don't understand. We haven't solved alignment. It's very tricky. And he's like, just fix the model. And I'm sort of curious, as people who have come out of the traditional cyber world, but are now in the AI world, Where do you land on this question? Can you just like, guys, just fix the sandbox, or is there something deeper here?
00:35:35 · Thai Duong, Joe Weisenthal, S1
[00:35:35] S4: I don't think that it's simple to fix the sandbox. That's the problem. People think that, you know, maybe people are not insecure. They think that there's a simple solution to cybersecurity. Just do this thing and you're safe. And that's how we have so many problems, you know. Vendors go out and tell people, just buy this box, this magic box. and put it in your network and you'll be safe. No, it's not like that. Even that box has problems. If you look into like, there's a famous idea in security, like product security is not the same as security product. Like security products may not have product security. Even like the firewalls that you buy, they may have problems. And they do. And what I mean here is, so... What we found, like the Hugging Face and OpenAI incident was fascinating, right? To watch. And it's difficult. Enterprise security is very difficult. Anybody saying like, oh, just buy this thing, just do that thing, you're going to be safe. No, it's just like very complicated. And the reason is like, and then people say, oh, just fix the model. And that's a comeback to the- And. [00:36:46] S0: Just fix the model, just make one that doesn't hack. [00:36:49] S4: That comes back to the incentive again. And because if you look at like how AI companies, and Jensen must be careful here, right? Because if AI company is not making money, he's not making money as well. [00:37:00] S1: Yeah, of course.