Coordinated Disclosure in the LLM Age

[Jeremy Stanley <fungi () yuggoth org>]

As I'm sure is the case for everyone, the projects I work in are 
under a seemingly unending deluge of vulnerability reports from 
researchers using LLMs to mine for security gold in our software. At 
the same time, we see maintainers on our projects relying on 
LLM-oriented tools to develop fixes for vulnerabilities and compose 
prose for advisories.

While I take a moment to catch my breath, this new Bizarro World 
we're all living in has gotten me thinking about the risks of public 
LLM services to embargoed vulnerability handling workflows and 
traditional coordinated disclosure. The operators of these LLM 
services are known to feed prompts and results back into their 
training data, presumably making it faster and easier for the same 
information to be found later by other users of the same service.  
Would keeping embargoes short help to mitigate related risks of 
parallel rediscovery or outright disclosure to other LLM users? It 
seems to me that there must be some inherent lag in this process, 
but how much?

I'm sorely tempted, both due to the increased volume and the risk of 
premature disclosure, to just assume that any vulnerability reported 
as a result of research using an LLM is trivially discoverable by 
others, and give up trying to pretend there's any point to working 
it under embargo. Similarly, it makes sense to me that patch 
development and descriptive prose shouldn't be produced with LLM 
assistance for any vulnerability that is being worked under an 
embargo.

I can't be the only one whose been pondering this... what positions 
have the rest of you taken?

[P.S. No LLMs were exploited in the making of this message.]
--
Jeremy Stanley

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