Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days

(github.com)

202 points | by binyu 2 hours ago

21 comments

  • Retr0id 1 hour ago
    I took a look at the Ghidra ones (because I use Ghidra), and I'm unimpressed: https://github.com/bikini/exploitarium/blob/main/ghidra-12.1...

    The first requires being able to overwrite binaries in the Swift tool directory. Yes, if you overwrite binaries executed by ghidra, you can trigger code execution. This is not a surprise.

    The second, idk, I'm not familiar with TraceRMI (but it's probably worth noting that "RMI" stands for Remote Method Invocation).

    The third is not a vulnerability in the slightest, they just demonstrate that native 7zip parsing code is reachable. Maybe there is a bug in the 7zip parser, but without that it's meaningless.

    • woodruffw 3 minutes ago
      The Gitea one looks marginally interesting, but is probably not exploitable in practice (unless Gitea or whoever else isn’t properly isolating jobs on dedicated VMs). I suspect GitHub Actions has similar behavior and is not considered exploitable because the user is assumed to already have local, non-namespaced root access.
    • ryukoposting 17 minutes ago
      I'm no expert on any of these programs, but that's kinda the problem, isn't it? No single person is an expert on every codebase supposedly exploited in this repo.

      After a bit of research, the Firefox one seems plausible to me. But, I haven't actually tried the POC. The explanation about the private-data and untrusted-input flags is plausible but I'm not an expert on Firefox's internals, maybe that's not actually how it works.

      This just sucks, all around. Are we going to need every open source project gawking at the same repo full of stuff that has nothing to do with them, on the off chance that someone discloses a vuln that does have to do with them? Is this some kind of performative complaint about high friction in responsible disclosure? Well great job dickhead, you've just made a system that's even worse. Nobody benefits from this. Yuck yuck yuck.

      • trinari 3 minutes ago
        I actually prefer them being public than in some governments or corporations toolbox
    • andrepd 26 minutes ago
      > Yes, if you overwrite binaries executed by ghidra, you can trigger code execution.

      > but it's probably worth noting that "RMI" stands for Remote Method Invocation

      This reminds me of someone submitting a (clearly vibecoded) vulnerability report claiming to have found a way to execute arbitrary SQL. The project in question? An SQL server... https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso/pull/4322

    • skerit 34 minutes ago
      I immediately saw the Ghidra one and was thinking: huh?
    • firefax 26 minutes ago
      The bigger takeaway is someone that smart is pissed off and dropping their shit with zero warning... but hey, that's just like, my opinion man.
      • Retr0id 25 minutes ago
        You don't need to be pissed off to decide that immediate public disclosure is the best option.
  • doe88 45 minutes ago
    0-days-vibes-vulns? There should be a new category, for spotting and handling the em-dashes of this brave new world of vulns and making the old fossils like me only picking my head up for the old painfully still hand-crafted artisanal ones instead. A kind of label, like free-range for eggs, in sum.
    • tyre 32 minutes ago
      Yes, big pet peeve of the new world. Every em dash is apparently an AI trigger. Back in my day, they were a sign of great respect within my people.
      • rogerrogerr 4 minutes ago
        I used to be an em-dash user, but now my opinion is that I’d rather be perceived as someone who does not want to be confused with an LLM. So I’ve changed my writing style.
      • Barbing 5 minutes ago
        I might like to see a collection of pre-2022 em-dash usage—a subset I suppose of the Low Background Steel category (https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai).
      • sureMan6 4 minutes ago
        You completely misunderstanding the comment feels like an AI trigger
  • Tiberium 1 hour ago
    Are they all actually 0-day? I think a lot of them are from disclosed CVEs/code that were already fixed upstream. It often seems like the term "0-day" has lost most of its meaning today and people often use it to refer to any exploits.
    • tempest_ 1 hour ago
      Repo claims

      > A single archive of public exploit PoCs and vulnerability research writeups. At the time I post these, none have been reported. Feel free to report them yourself and take credit for the CVE if handed out lulz. Please do not abuse these. I do this so to allure people into the field, and I've always found this is the most efficient way.

      Which is roughly the definition of zero day. Whether the contents of the repo reflect the above claim is something else entirely.

      • tyre 33 minutes ago
        > Please do not abuse these.

        Reminds me of Jamie Wolf's joke about bestiality laws. Who are those for? What stops most people from bestiality is… not wanting to have sex with animals! For people who do want to, what, they won't because of… the law??

        Who will this comment stop??

        • GTP 17 minutes ago
          Well, it's a joke because the problem becomes apparent after you think a bit about it. The exact same reasonig can be applied to anything illegal, criminals are criminals because they don't respect the law, so you could try to say that laws are useless. Reality is, if something is illegal not only someone can be punished after the fact, but in some cases also preventive measures can be taken.

          Regarding the comment, it isn't going to stop anyone. Most people will not do cybercrime because they're honest. Of the remaining, the risk of being sentenced to jail time will instead stop some people, even if not all of them.

        • jldl805 26 minutes ago
          The laws are to punish the act once discovered. Not to inhibit it, primarily. Which I suppose cuts down on the incidence of the act in the long run,
        • BoxFour 22 minutes ago
          Those seem like two different scenarios though, right?

          The point of beastiality laws are to give society some recourse to punish people who abuse animals.

          There was a very famous case back in Washington state back in the early 2000s where a group of men were sexually abusing horses. It was uncovered because one of them died, and the other could only be charged with trespassing because it wasn't illegal at the time to sexually abuse animals.

        • seanclayton 12 minutes ago
          > Who are those for?

          The people who want to see the people doing bestiality punished

        • utopiah 31 minutes ago
          If it stops even just 1 person once, isn't it already worth it?
        • nostrademons 14 minutes ago
          The jury, maybe.
        • PKop 22 minutes ago
          Either the fear of the consequences of breaking the law, or that the most effective way to reduce crime is to remove criminals from the population so over time these people being in jail or worse decreases the crime rate. They don't have to care about breaking laws in the abstract for the law, properly enforced, to reduce crime.
  • drob518 1 hour ago
    There is going to be a flurry of this sort of stuff as the AIs get smart enough to find them. It will naturally die down as the legitimate ones are fixed. Yes, there will always be some level of this, but I’d expect it to be low and the exploits found to be increasingly complex. This is a time of transition.
    • utopiah 28 minutes ago
      > a flurry of this sort of stuff as the AIs get smart enough to find them.

      I really think this characterization is misleading. It's not "getting smart", only more tailored toward a specific usage, better curated dataset, better harness, better prompts, better labeling of results, documentation of failures and success, etc.

      The outcome is (hopefully) overall better but this anthropomorphized wording makes it sound like AI itself is somehow changing or evolving. No, both academia doing fundamental research, industry making it available commercially, and finally security researchers making the entire tooling and process packaged as a service are actively shaping it to make it better. There is no "it".

      • handoflixue 16 minutes ago
        Do you have a definition of "smart" such that there is something an AI could do to prove itself intelligent?

        Or are you just defining "fast" as something only horses can do, and considering that a useful insight about cars?

      • drob518 22 minutes ago
        Yes, of course. I’m definitely anthropomorphizing as a shorthand. I’m the first one to say that these models are just a lot of matrix math.
    • jMyles 34 minutes ago
      > It will naturally die down as the legitimate ones are fixed.

      Seems like we're already in the middle of this phase, but rather than dying down, the 'reports' have just gotten more noisy and obtuse, making it more difficult to establish the actual degree of threat / attack vector.

      • justacrow 24 minutes ago
        And if you are a state agency who'd like to keep the undisclosed zero-days you rely on secret, spamming maintainers with reports makes sense.

        As a bonus if you find any actual zero-days in your mass-generated ones you don't report it and get a new one to play with.

        • alwa 2 minutes ago
          I mean. Makes sense until adversary states start walking through the same doors you’re using. At which point you might regret that maintainers are too flooded to deal with it.

          Assuming, of course, said state agency is operating under sufficiently strategic governance and management…

  • ok123456 38 minutes ago
    Pretty unimpressive as security vulnerabilities. It would be better to just say these are simple bugs for the most part.
    • unnouinceput 20 minutes ago
      all vulnerabilities are just bugs.
      • GTP 13 minutes ago
        Vulns are a subset of bugs. What the above commenter is saying, is that some bugs don't belong to this category.
      • stonogo 13 minutes ago
        But not the other way around, which makes them different.
  • kodareef5 1 hour ago
    trying something new? this is interesting. the problem is that submitting reports is too slow. if you find one then your not supposed to share. but then over the next 90 days you learn no one cares and 13 other people submitted it before you, 43 after. maybe better that we just know. so we can run code we can trust sooner. zero is the proper number of dependencies. otherwise assume its broken.
  • bassiee 35 minutes ago
    I also have a library of bugs I found using Claude Opus 4.8 through the Customer Verification Program. Undisclosed, Atp I dont even know if they have been found by someone else. But just like this repo

    Theres a bunch of very specific scenario DoS bugs, buffer over/ underflows, that will get caught by ASLR and whatnot

    When I report serious ones, mostly the devs will respond with something like, yeah, thats how we designed it in a dangerous way, so that the layer above or below can solve the issues, and other footgun stuff.

  • jdw64 1 hour ago
    I'm going through each one, and it's fascinating to see things like this. The UAF principle in c-ares is really interesting.

    The problem ultimately came from not being able to prevent stale pointers. The attack works by figuring out the size of the stale pointer, then spraying memory with data of the same size, and finally achieving RCE (Remote Code Execution). How do people even come up with ideas like this?

    • jdw64 1 hour ago
      But do people actually find these vulnerabilities on their own, or are they using LLMs? I was curious about how these vulnerabilities work, so I tried asking my dear friend Mr. CLAUDE, but he immediately threw an error and ended the session because it was a cybersecurity question. Enterprise APIs block even the analysis itself, so it's amazing that people can actually pull this off in practice.
      • nicce 2 minutes ago
        People have always used tools. Some people have better tools than others. I guess the line is thin whether they found on their own or not.
      • raesene9 8 minutes ago
        If you want to chat with Claude about this, I'd recommend using Opus 4.6. IME it's happy to talk about (and even write) PoC exploits
      • lacoolj 1 hour ago
        I imagine this is a large open model like GLM5.2 etc
    • jeffbee 1 hour ago
      le sigh, c-ares. Very predictable outcome. If you ever find yourself entertaining the idea that you will simply write non-blocking network protocol stacks in C with manual lifetime management, slap yourself. It doesn't matter if you think you are a super genius of unimpeachable taste. The job is impossible.
      • jdw64 58 minutes ago
        Thank goodness I use a GC language
  • mrbluecoat 1 hour ago
    A surprising amount of documentation if the actor was just LLM-dropping these..
    • Retr0id 1 hour ago
      Why is that surprising? LLMs can churn out arbitrary volumes of "documentation" in an instant.
    • dawnerd 1 hour ago
      That seems trivial for an llm to provide.
  • merelydev 1 hour ago
    Most of the exploits are for opensource/free software.

    I don't know what methods where used to find these exploits but I am starting to think security through obscurity might not be a bad thing in this day and age, where someone can just let bots loose on your codebase.

    • serf 1 hour ago
      llms are fantastic disassembly partners, they're quite good at labeling functions from various dissassemblers -- the net losses from losing the benefits of open source , imo , outweigh the protection afforded by hiding your source code in yet another layer that is more and more easily unrolled through automated procedures.
      • blensor 1 hour ago
        And isn't it also mostly a transitioning issue. Those open codebases will be constantly scanned for potential security issues and getting more and more hardened. There are probably a lot of easy wins that are going to be discovered over the next few years but it should taper out after a while.
        • merelydev 1 hour ago
          Fair point but it assumes we all have access to LLMs with the same capabilities.
          • yjftsjthsd-h 1 hour ago
            I don't think that's exactly it. OSS only needs someone to have a strong LLM to check for bugs. If your software is proprietary, it's a competition between just you and whatever model you have vs any attacker and whatever model they can lay hand to.
            • GTP 8 minutes ago
              I don't see the difference.

              > OSS only needs someone to have a strong LLM to check for bugs.

              The same applies to propietary, closed-source code. It being closed-source means that the source isn't generally available, but the executable is. Hence, someone with a strong model can still reverse it and find vulns.

      • spongebobstoes 1 hour ago
        disassembly only applies to client side software

        something like nginx could arguably be more secure if it was closed source

        (I am a proponent of and contributor to open source)

        • gpm 1 hour ago
          Only until a single server running nginx is hacked and the binary leaked though...
        • Hizonner 1 hour ago
          Um, the nginx binary would have to be in the hands of hundreds of thousands of server operators. And the set of server operators is rich in the kind of person who would attack it. Not to mention the huge number of leaks you'd get.

          Maybe if it's some server-side software that you only use yourself...

    • derektank 54 minutes ago
      Presumably, one could let the bots loose on your own codebase first. The question is one of financing of course. If your end users are enterprises willing to pay for a support contract, they probably care enough about not getting hacked to endure the higher prices that would let you throw enough tokens at the problem. Other open-source projects might have a harder time.
    • maxloh 1 hour ago
      Open source is a good thing, but I don't think what you are proposing is accurate.

      A different way to frame this would be that those bugs would never be surfaced or exploited if the software were proprietary.

    • grayhatter 31 minutes ago
      > I don't know what methods where used to find these exploits but I am starting to think security through obscurity might not be a bad thing in this day and age, where someone can just let bots loose on your codebase.

      I'd love to hear why you think obscurity is bad, if you now think maybe it's good in the LLM age?

      I'd also be interested if you could describe exactly what or how you think security through obscurity works, or doesn't?

      I've been thinking a lot about how to better teach this concept, so I'm looking to understand exactly how everyone thinks/understands how it currently works, or should work, or what it should do. I don't care about the "correct" answer, (I have ddg too :P) I'm interested in general expectations from SWE's that I might teach at work, instead of opinions of security eng speaking about theory.

    • throwaway613746 1 hour ago
      [dead]
  • functionmouse 1 hour ago
    we have got to stop putting our bank accounts and SSNs on computers
    • ryandrake 1 hour ago
      We need our infrastructure to stop treating bank account numbers and social security numbers as secrets. At least in the US, bank account numbers appear on physical checks and are required to be shared in order to do an ACH transfer, and a social security number is not supposed to be used as an identifier (unless to the Social Security Administration itself) or as a secret password.

      Ideally, nothing nefarious should happen if both of them were listed and queryable publicly.

      • silversmith 39 minutes ago
        Hang on, can you actually do something nefarious with just the bank account number?
        • ryandrake 30 minutes ago
          If someone has your bank account and bank’s routing number (which is also not secret), they can make fraudulent ACH transfers and payments from your account. Of course it will most likely be caught as fraud some time after the fact, but just those two bits of not-secret info are enough to grief someone.
          • rogerrogerr 0 minutes ago
            And both numbers, plus your name and address and a convenient sample of your signature, are on every check you’ve ever written.
      • derektank 50 minutes ago
        It’s quite ridiculous that we haven’t been able to build a modern identification system capable of replacing SSNs in the last 30 years.
    • dgellow 3 minutes ago
      You all need a better system than US SSNs
    • pixel_popping 35 minutes ago
      Firewalled VM, locked-in keyboard/mouse, 1 query to any agent and it's setup.
    • gnerd00 1 hour ago
      ... support cash, tell your neighbors
      • Cider9986 1 hour ago
        And Monero for online.
      • JohnMakin 1 hour ago
        til you get debanked
        • krapp 1 hour ago
          Cash doesn't require a bank.
          • speedgoose 51 minutes ago
            Banks are kinda useful to avoid getting robbed all your money, on a regular basis.

            Many French people with crypto money experienced that the hard way recently.

            • nubg 17 minutes ago
              do you have links about the french people?
  • jmward01 42 minutes ago
    I think people may miss the point of a repo like this. Individually these are small puzzle pieces that can't do anything. Put them all in one place and it becomes easier to pick up pieces and try them together to see if they fit and build something bigger. Get enough pieces to fit together and you actually have something. This is the 'FOUO' idea in security. Enough open information gathered together in one place crosses the boundary from 'just public info' to 'secret stuff here!'. Now we have automatic puzzle solvers (coding assistants) a repo like this becomes a lot more meaningful.
    • esikich 39 minutes ago
      Yep and typically none of this is meaningful unless you have no security practices at all. You can't have it both ways. Every security team says these things are all critical even though, for example, it's only being used internally. Cool, so you somehow have our network cert, are on site physically, have compromised a laptop fully without all of our tools detecting weird shit, have a password, admin access to the repo, somehow are spoofing MFA, etc etc. Yeah it all adds up, but as an admin I'm just fucking done dropping everything for these kinds of things.
  • jiug 33 minutes ago
    "Cibercrime is cringe"
  • johnwheeler 57 minutes ago
    That's one way to do it.
  • grayhatter 39 minutes ago
    > At the time I post these, none have been reported. Feel free to report them yourself and take credit for the CVE if handed out lulz. I do this so to allure people into the field, and I've always found this is the most efficient way.

    I've been a skiddy, he would have believed this. Thankfully, I've grown a bit, and can see this for the transparent, "I'm angry and want to hurt others so I don't feel alone", it actually is.

    I'm sorry you're so angry dude (me too), but as someone who's joined the blue side, we'd appreciate it if you gave us some kind of heads up, the bad guys generally have a lot more time to scroll for new payloads than I do. Not all of us deserve the kindness of a heads up, but every single one of our users deserve it. Don't punish them because you're mad at someone else.

    You can flex on the idiots you're trying to flex on, without hurting people. Even an email to security@[that_project_domain] saying "hey, I've published these" would move you from the group of people I see making the world worse, into the group making it better. (You don't have to, obviously, but making the world worse wont make you less angry.)

    • voodooEntity 20 minutes ago
      While i can follow your path, maybe because i see the same, i sadly have seen in groups of friends how this can go sideways very fast. If you report things, some companies gone treat you as a criminal/offensive actor and even go legal actions against you even you just tellem here you got this vuln.

      Sure you than can do it anonymous and so on but point is : its not like every actor that gets notified will react thankful to it. Some even just ignore it.

  • tliltocatl 1 hour ago
    A friendly reminder that a 0-day is a vulnerability that wasn't known until after a malicious actor exploited it. If someone publishes a PoC, it is not a 0-day, just a vulnerability.
    • Retr0id 58 minutes ago
      No, the days start counting from the availability of a patch.
      • rmast 13 minutes ago
        I was thinking that the other definition was right and this correction was wrong.

        Then I did some searching and found multiple examples of both definitions in use, making things murky.

        So I turned to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary: “ of, relating to, or being a vulnerability (as in a computer or computer system) that is discovered and exploited (as by cybercriminals) before it is known to or addressed by the maker or vendor”

        And of course they use an “or” to make it ambiguous as to whether the days start counting when the vulnerability becomes known, or when the vendor has addressed it.

      • 0123456789ABCDE 3 minutes ago
        what if a path is never released?
    • richbell 33 minutes ago
      I've only heard it used as Retr0id's definition.
  • ohadkr 1 hour ago
    Open source is the best
  • haberdasher 44 minutes ago
    "cybercrime is cringe"
  • yuvrajsa 4 minutes ago
    [flagged]
  • segmondy 46 minutes ago
    What if this person is from an AI lab that really wants the govt to keep suppressing Mythos/Fable & GPT5.6? It's what I would do, the timing couldn't be any better.
    • 0123456789ABCDE 27 minutes ago
      wouldn't it be trivial to match the repo to the user logs?