AI models increasingly powerful. Capable of finding 0 days and escaping latest KVM (Trail of Bits). Opinion: AI usage necessary part of security.
Does Whonix project use AI to help security? Scans with best models? Joined cyber access tiers of AI companies (Daybreak/Glasswing)?
Read wiki Whonix Policy On Artificial Intelligence (AI), not clear on how it is used.
Yes, quite heavily. Enough so that at least one person thought (incorrectly, thankfully) that we had become a vibecoded project:
We have a pretty sophisticated set of both human and automated safeguards so that we can use AI to find security issues and harden our code while avoiding the risks that usually come with vibecoding. (We’re quite enthusiastic about AI’s capabilities, but also treat it as an external contributor, meaning we generally assume its output is vulnerable and/or malicious until proven otherwise.)
We use the best we have access to. At the moment I believe that’s a slightly older version of Claude Opus (we tried newer versions but they didn’t give us as good of results).
I am not aware of the project having done this. I doubt we’d be able to get access to those kinds of tools due to our somewhat niche status. That being said, new models are coming out that are very good at finding vulns while being not-so-good at exploiting them, and those are becoming easier to access, so hopefully we’ll adopt them once we can get to them.
That’s an overview of how contributors (maintainers included) are to use AI in their work. It’s basically “you don’t have to use AI, but if you do, here’s what we expect from you.”
Should apply. Likely Whonix or contributors will be accepted. Friends have OpenAI Daybreak Blue / Anthropic Cyber Verification Program. Friends not famous people, working on projects with less reach than Whonix. Minimal verification needed, think only ID/face. Likely individual contributors accepted.
Know some companies have Daybreak Red, think access requires organization application. Possibly accepted. Glasswing likely impossible.
More power, less blocks than normal served models. Strongly suggest.
My experience: latest best models find more subtle bugs than predecessors. Friends experience same. Benchmarks align. Still impactful bugs despite subtlety. True for GPT-Astra and Fable 5.1 to me. Better result, even when not verified in previous mentioned programs. Opinion: worth using Astra/Fable to find bugs. Worst case, Kimi K3 does not block for security queries. Heard better than Opus but never tried.
I seriously doubt Daybreak Red would be at all useful to us, since we’re purely on the defensive security side of the malware arms race. Blue might be interesting theoretically.
Worst case scenario, if a community member with access to fancy models wants to scan Whonix, they’re welcome to do so (you included if you have that kind of access). If a model finds anything interesting, please follow the security vulnerability reporting process:
Big software companies use red teams. Attack = finding bugs, I think good. Blue/CVP worth trying, likely you will be accepted.
Would try when I have time. I don’t have program access. Don’t want to give up privacy. Since you can get access, likely better result if you also do it.
From what I understand, the Blue models are good at finding vulns but less good at exploiting them. Red is good at finding vulns and weaponizing them. For our own code, finding the vuln is enough, we know the code well enough to know if something is a problem even if we don’t have a working exploit for it. Weaponizing a vulnerability might be useful in theory to prove to a third-party project that a bug is really a problem, but the few times we’ve needed to do that, we’ve had the sufficient skill to weaponize a vuln ourselves so we could include a sample exploit in a vuln report. Even if we had access to Daybreak Red, I doubt we’d be scanning other people’s code with it. (Plus, Daybreak Red is approximately three times as expensive as Daybreak Blue.)
Yes. Sometimes Blue users complain of blocks in finding stage. Red marginally more useful still.
Would reassure to know Whonix is using best cybersecurity models and joining important available programs. Strongly suggest.
Unfortunately cannot do myself since no program access. Privacy reasons. But will try with public versions later.
Expected response time? Two days passed since reporting low-medium issue. PGP encrypted email. Should add response time to docs.
Discussed internally. Likely invalid / low impact.
That specific one, feel free to post in public forums.