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Speaker 2This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by Chachi PT. I'm Carol Masser. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Businessweek's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than it does to employees. With the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices. But according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company. And Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, must be willing to work, extended hours, and weekends as needed. One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChachiPT. Get started at chachipt.com.
Speaker 3For big business, AI opened up a world of promise, but that world of promise turned into a world of pain. Costs spiraling, data trapped, security and governance risks, multiplying, and ROI out of reach. That's why enterprises turned to Boomi to connect data, apps, and AI, helping them operate securely, efficiently, and at scale. Boomi turns a world of AI pain into a world of AI gain. As Boomi says, we got you. Head to boomi.com. That's B-O-O-M-I dot com.
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Speaker 2Podcasts, radio, news. Hello, and welcome to another episode
Speaker 5of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracey Alloway.
Speaker 1And I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Speaker 5Joe, it's October. We're recording this on October 29th. Yeah. It is also Black October. Have you heard this term?
Speaker 1Yeah. What does that mean? Have stocks gone down?
Speaker 5No. Your mind immediately goes to markets. There are other worlds out there. We're going to be talking about the Black October. We're going to be talking about the world of cybersecurity today because one of the reasons people are talking about Black October is we've had a number of recent security issues, the most prominent of which has been a bunch of vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, which is a coding language that apparently is used by 70% of websites in existence. We can get into that stat later. But the really interesting thing about this vulnerability being uncovered is AI was used to uncover it. And so the big question coming back to AI, you know, there's a concern now that you have good actors who are maybe using AI to discover old vulnerabilities and trying to fix them. But you could also have bad actors who are using AI to exploit those same vulnerabilities. So we're back to the question of whether AI makes the Internet safer or more dangerous.
Speaker 1It makes it more dangerous. No, I have no idea. Ever since essentially Anthropic announced that they had this model called Mythos and now it's Project Glass Wind. Which was rolled out to companies to use for defensive purposes before it was available to the general public. There has been much more awareness of cyber security issues as it relates to AI. And there are many things that people debate about AI and some of these bigger existential questions. Pretty much everyone agrees cyber security good, more cyber security good. I will say I know very little about the world of cyber security. I don't know what, for example, a cyber security company actually sells. I don't know. I don't know how if I were buying cyber security, I would know whether it's working or whether no one had tried to hack me or not or something like that. I need to learn a lot more, but it's absolutely true about the uptick in the volume of hacks.
Speaker 5There are hackers out there right now taking notes going, Joe doesn't know anything about cyber security, probably doesn't have a VPN.
Speaker 1I don't. That's why my vibe coding projects, I don't want to ever, I have yet to build anything with an account because I don't want to like have to think about that. So it's just like, I don't want to count information with anyone. But I have, as a user of technical products, over the last several weeks, you get more emails saying like, our thing was compromised. You're probably fine, but maybe you should refresh some keys or whatever. This is happening. This is real. And everyone really needs to learn more. And if you think about like Black Swans and Wall Street and all that stuff, you know, there's been for years, a lot of talk about cyber as a major risk out there.
Speaker 5Yeah. All right. Well, we do in fact have the perfect guests. We're going to be speaking to two, two people from the company Calif. One of the companies that actually uncovered this PHP vulnerability. The other one was a company called Wiz. We have Tai Yun. He is the CEO over at Calif, which is a hacking firm. And we can get into exactly what that means. As well as Bruce Dang. He is an engineer at Calif as well. So Tai and Bruce, thank you so much for coming on Odd Thoughts.
Speaker 6I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 5So just to begin with, because you know, hackers kind of, they always have cool achievements that they like to do. They like to talk about. Why don't we just go ahead and start with who you are and what are the coolest things you've done in your hacking career?
Speaker 6Yeah. Um, so I started my career at Microsoft like almost 20 years ago in the Microsoft security response center. These are the people that do patch Tuesdays, you know, like on the second Tuesday of every month, Microsoft released an update. So I worked in that team a long time ago. Probably the biggest thing I did there and that I could talk about is, uh, I helped, uh, reverse engineer, the Stuxnet virus, which is one of the, the one that was related to the, uh, supposedly the Iranian nuclear program was used to sabotage the Iranian nuclear
Speaker 5program. This is the thing that people describe it as the world's first like known digital cyber weapon,
Speaker 6right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure there were many others before, but, but yeah, that's, that's the first public one. Yeah. I, uh, I worked there for almost a decade and then I, uh, I left to do a startup with, with my friends and then I joined Apple. I worked on iOS security and then Ty managed to convince me to follow the, uh, the church of AI. And so I, here I am.
Speaker 7Yeah. It took me four years to convince Bruce. So, you know, um, when you go to a website or you go to Amazon, um, even Facebook, Instagram, uh, your computer will share information with the server, right? Yeah. And there would be, um, the information would travel through many, many other servers, like your ISP, your wifi routers. So you want to encrypt that information to make sure that only the server can see your data, nobody else. And there's a mechanism for that. It's called the SSL protocol or the later version is called like TOS, like transport layer security protocol. So, um, I love those protocols and, um, back in the day, together with, uh, friends, we found a bunch of ways to break the protocols, you know, to decrypt the data. And, um, it's pretty cool. It's actually changed the internet, how the internet works because we basically, um, show that in the past that like two protocols, like SSL version 3.0 that was invented by Netscape. You know, you remember Netscape 30 years ago, and then people still use it. Because it's still working somewhat. But we show that, oh, it's not working very correctly. If you use SSL 3.0, then people can decrypt your data. So we help the internet like really, really remove like SSL 3.0. And, um, that's one thing. The other thing that I really enjoy doing was, um, you know, people think that in the past you have compression, you have some data and you want to compress the data and you have encryption. And both of them actually randomize your data in some way, right? If you look at the zip file, you open the zip file, look at the raw binaries by data in the zip file, look random to you because all the redundant information has been removed and encoded in a way to reduce the size of the file. And so one of the basic question in computer security was would you compress data and then you encrypt? Or you encrypt then compress? Wow. And, uh, you know, I took some, uh, crypto class at Stanford University. And, uh, I remember my professor, he asked this question in one of the homework assignments. And, um, the obvious answer back then was you don't want to compress and then, uh, you don't want to encrypt and compress because encryption randomize your data. It means that compression would be less effective. So the right answer is you compress, and then you encrypt. That was the correct answer on my homework assignment. I think I took that class in 2011 and then three years later we found that it's wrong. If you do that, then people can actually decrypt your data. And the way it works is pretty cool, I can explain to you. So compression actually reveals, if you look at a compressed file, you know how well it is compressed, right? Because it's softer. It's smaller. The compression is very good because there's a lot of redundant information. That's why compression works well. It means that if you look at a compression alone, the size of the compression, a compressed file, you can tell whether the file has a lot of redundant information. And encryption hides the length. So it doesn't hide the size of the encrypted data. When you encrypt a message, you can still see that this message is maybe this long, or this message may be this long. Because encryption doesn't try to hide that. Some people try to do that. So it means that if you compress and then you encrypt, it means that I can see whether your message has some redundant information, has a lot of redundant information. And that alone is a leakage already, right? That you don't want to review. And I gave you an example. Like let's say that you take a message, like a random message that I gave you, and then you put your password together with that message. Let's just say that there's a way, there's a reason for you to do that. You put your password together with the message I gave you, and you compress together. And then you encrypt it with a key that I don't know. And you review the ciphertext, the result, encrypt the message to me. So supposedly I don't have the key, I shouldn't be able to read the message, right? But because I gave you a message, and you get my message put together with the message, with your password, you compress together. If the compression works very well, then I know whether my message has some redundancy with your password.
Speaker 5You can reverse engineer between like the two relationships.
Speaker 7Yeah, exactly. And you do that like repeatedly, eventually we can recover your password. And that's exactly what we found on these web encryption protocol, like in the past, that's exactly what they did. They take my data, they concatenate your password, they encrypt together, they compress together, and then they send over the wire. And then as an attacker, I can see the length, and that's enough for me to decrypt. And that's the solution was really interesting because they decided to turn off like compression. There's no solution. And then eventually I was at Google back then. I was born in Saigon, Vietnam. Then I got a job in Mountain View for a consultancy, like what we do. So I moved to Mountain View in 2011, and then I joined Google later that year. And I did cryptography at Google, basically help people do cryptography correctly, like try to avoid the mistakes that we found. I was there for 12 years. I work on like very. Last number of products. Google has a lot of products, right? Gmail, Chrome browser that we are using right now. And there's a lot of people out there that want to hack Google and their products. So my job was to hack these products before we released them to the public. And I was there for 12 years, and then I left to create Calif. And yeah. That's fantastic.
Speaker 1I'm already fascinated by this conversation. I want to get into. Obviously what Calif does specifically, I want to get into some of the latest vulnerabilities. But before we do that, you know, both of you have had long careers that by and large predate what we now call AI. Are the risks associated with AI a sort of continuation on some path that cybersecurity have well understood, or are we in a truly novel area for how we should we be thinking about AI? I think it's
Speaker 6a combination of the two. We've always known that there are security vulnerabilities in systems. And so, you know, we have security engineers who are hackers who try to find and exploit these vulnerabilities. So the system has always been vulnerable to some degree, to a varying degree. What AI has done is it's kind of accelerated the speed in which you identify and exploit these vulnerabilities to a level where it's almost like superhuman. You know, like 20 years ago. Yeah. 20 years ago, Microsoft would release, let's say, maybe 20 updates every month. Now, you're looking at like, you know, 1400 updates per month, you know, and that number is going to continue to grow. It's just to give you an idea of like the scale of things. And now, you know, what, for example, say to have certain systems, it may take you, let's say, three months with lots of people. Now that may take you a few days with just one person. And a very capable AI model. That's the reality that we're in today. It even changed the way how attackers, you know, like have certain types of systems, you know, like in the banking sector, the way our customers are in, you can tell some stories about that time. But that's kind of what I think it's, I think it's the systems have always been vulnerable to some degree. And now it's the AI just accelerates that and makes it much more visible. And it's also made it easier for people to identify. these vulnerabilities as well. Yeah. And so, and then, you know, obviously there are pros and cons to that, but yeah, you can go into that later.
Speaker 5Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis. Sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets fast. Every week experts from Barclays markets and research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next concise, focused and brief search Barclays brief, wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2I'm Carol Masser. So writes Bloomberg business weeks, Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk to get hired candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence, a spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices, but according to recruiters advisors and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates quote, must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed. One major perk for all that hard work employees access to equity. Either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg tech minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com. Why don't we talk about
Speaker 5discovering the PHP vulnerability then, because I think this was a joint project between Calif, Wiz, and I think it was OpenAI. How did you find this? What was the process? And then what was the decision? I know you guys have gotten a little bit of pushback about. Publicizing it before it was fixed. So what was the process of actually, you know, putting out the statement saying we found
Speaker 7this thing? We really interested in like finding vulnerabilities that have a wide impact. And we want to understand these vulnerabilities to help like inform decisions, like defense decisions, how to fix and how to mitigate them like for once and forever. On that background. So we joined the. OpenAI's past the planet program. This is where OpenAI funds, you know, companies like Calif to go out and help open source maintainers to identify and fix mitigate vulnerabilities in their software. And we have this engineer like Ryan Osteen, who is, he's like a PHP historian. Yesterday we went to a conference in San Francisco. We basically presented like, you know, PHP to Shell and Ryan walk everybody over like the 25 years of history of PHP vulnerabilities. So we have this like engineer, Ryan, and this is how we work. Basically we, our engineer, they interested in certain things and then they just go and hack those things and, you know, ask business people who try to see, okay, how can we convince some other people to pay us? for this work and that's exactly what we did with OpenAI. over the eye okay we're gonna hack php can you uh fund our work and they said yes they gave us tokens and money and then we go and convince like php foundation which is the organization behind php that let's work together you know we can help you and it's actually pretty interesting because i mentioned like they're like a history of 25 years of like php vulnerabilities and the person that is behind all of these hacks is like stephen escher he's also at calif he joined us i think six months ago back in the day he's the php security guy basically he hacked and helped like heartland php so we didn't know anybody at the beach beach foundation so we asked stefan to introduce us and because you know even though stefan stopped working on php security for a while now his name still rings you know very loudly in this circle of the world i saw
Speaker 5the um the comic that you guys put up about this it was kind of funny yes he's like indiana jones type character yeah
Speaker 7so he connected us and then we met with like volker dutch at the php foundation and yeah that's how we got started i think we started in july 30 and then immediately after one or two weeks you know ryan found the first vulnerability and he was interested in like fighting a similar vulnerability similar to one vulnerability that like stefan disclosed like 22 years ago and to his surprise you know there's still a bunch of them like that in the php uh you know software right now and um so that's how that's how we found it and then we reported it to the php foundation because we know immediately that is a critical vulnerability that could affect like a large part of the internet then the beach beach foundation actually shared with us that they actually filed this vulnerability the same vulnerability two years ago but they didn't fix it because uh when they found it they discovered that like the fix is very expensive and they just like maybe a few options to fix it and none of them were actually perfect because um you know they need to change a lot of like functionalities within php and those changes may introduce new bugs new vulnerabilities or new reliability issues and people would be very upset if they upgrade you know php and their website and you know they don't have the functionality to fix it and they don't have the ability to fix it they don't know how to fix it they don't know how to fix it the website stopped working so in the end back in like 2024 the bcp foundation decided not to fix it because there was no exploit no one could manage to show that this is actually a real issue and that's exactly what they asked us they come back they ask like do you have an exploit then the next day we share with them the first exploit that showed them that yeah someone uh doesn't need to know anything can hack your website
Speaker 5remotely so just to be clear the use of ai in all of this it wasn't necessarily that important in finding the vulnerability it was more important in developing an actual exploit for a known issue we think like
Speaker 7that's probably the right way to think about it but i think even for finding the vulnerability without ai it would take a lot of more time right so you you can imagine like php was created like maybe 30 years ago so it's a huge code base yeah with the loss of life feature and as a human engineer you have to dig into this code base and it will take like months right and along the way people may give up but the fact that php foundation filed the bug in 2024 approved that humans can actually file about find the bugs right and the problem was the exploitation like you said yeah and for exploitation like ai plays a major role in it it's like becomes an engineering problem where our engineers would tell ai you know this is how i want to design our exploit and you go and do it and then you know prove to us that it works correctly
Speaker 1yeah let me ask a philosophical question is there a reason to believe that defensive cyber security can stay ahead of offensive cyber security just generally then we can get into some details but philosophically like is that something that we can reasonably hope
Speaker 6for i think so yes how come because uh you can use the ai to build certain types of systems in ways that may be very challenging for attackers to exploit right um you know today you can use ai to build whatever systems you want you know and very quickly right and you can experiment you know get feedback very quickly it can also process data like very very quickly and reason about that data and so i think it is possible i think it may not be immediate but like you know over time we're gonna perhaps you know like use ai to help us write more secure software all right or build more secure systems right and eventually i think that should kind of like counterbalance the um the advantages that the attackers have like i think that's uh i i perhaps i'm being optimistic but i i do foresee this happening
Speaker 7i can add something there so if you look at the history of humanity our history is the history of like weaponized our tools right if you find a a powerful tool then someone would find a way to use that tool into as a weapon yeah so and attackers always are early adopters of tombs right new technology defenders move like at much slower pace than attackers but fundamentally we believe there are more good guys than bad guys out there and eventually you know the good guys would catch up and build things that help uh you know everybody defense fan up the bad guys and i i don't think like um in general like cyber security if you see the news all the time you see like we got like data bridge every day almost even before ai so you may feel like it's not working at all but if you're in the field you can see the progress right in the past like 25 years there's a tremendous progress in cyber security of course people still got happy because this is it's difficult it might be a little bit difficult but i think it's going to get better and imagine you have a very complex system very like imagine you have a house with a lot of doors a lot of way to get in and cyber security must like make sure that everything is safe at the same time your house or your office must remain open for business right so it's actually a pretty difficult problem at the same time without the progress that we like the industry met in the past 25 years things could be much worse right and i think the same thing would be happening here it's going to take a while for defenders to catch up right now you know ai helps attackers more than defenders is the
Speaker 5general idea that we're just in this sort of awkward phase where a lot of people in cyber security always refer to technical debt right this idea that you haven't upgraded a system for ages like the php vulnerability we were just discussing and so now you have to pay back that technical debt the idea that we're just in an awkward moment where ai is going to be able to exploit existing flaws in the system but maybe we eventually move to a place where we upgrade the entire system we reduce our
Speaker 7outstanding we reduce the
Speaker 5outstanding technical debt exactly
Speaker 7that's an optimistic way to look at it okay you know we found that they're like system that we thought that okay that don't have a lot of technical debt that turned out that they just like dumpster fire like everybody else that was a very big surprise right to me personally like we know there are places there are bad problems and we know that if we just point ai at that thing there will be a lot of bugs coming out but there are also places we thought that uh could be okay because they receive a lot of attention over the years already uh but turn out that there's still a lot of bugs there as well and a lot of bugs there as well and a lot of bugs there as well a lot mean like a lot more like 10x more than we expected and of course there are still like a few uh small places where there was fewer bugs back then before ai now there's still fewer bugs still now but they're like very small like very like lit like they are the exception not the norms so that's actually a big surprise uh because i don't think anybody's was surprised to find a critical vulnerability in php because php wasn't known for like race security so of course at the php to shell scale then that's a different matter but if you find another vulnerability in php today then that's not a surprise but if you go and you know find a vulnerability or maybe a hundred vulnerabilities, a thousand vulnerabilities in the Chrome browser, for example. That's a surprise. And that's exactly what happened. People found a thousand vulnerabilities in Chrome. And I was at Google and I knew, and then the entire industry assumed that and knew that, wow, there was a lot of investment in Chrome security. And not just eliminate vulnerabilities, but making sure that even if you have vulnerabilities, it's difficult to exploit these vulnerabilities. This is what we call mitigations. You accept that you have vulnerabilities, but then you make sure that attackers couldn't use the vulnerabilities to control your computer or your browser. We thought that the defense layers were pretty good and that the rate of vulnerabilities were low. But then after AI, we just discovered that either we, as security engineers, suck at our job, we couldn't find these things, or there's just too much code that we didn't have enough time to look into.
Speaker 1So this raises another question. Is it possible to have a provably secure browser or a piece of software, you ship the piece of software and you can prove maybe in the same way that mathematicians produce things and this thing called lean or whatever. Does cyber have an equivalent where you can say this is provably secure and we know that no matter how good AI gets, it will never find a vulnerability in this piece of software?
Speaker 6Oh, man, this is a loaded question, Joe.
Speaker 1I thought it was a simple question.
Speaker 6Yeah. I don't know. To be honest, browsers are its own operating system, very, very complex operating systems. Yeah. And today doing, you know, like formally verified software, you know, like it doesn't work at that scale. It's typically smaller, smaller software components.
Speaker 1So there is such thing as formal verification when it comes to software. Yes. You could have small piece of software in which you formally prove in the same way that it takes mathematicians seven lines to prove the two plus two equals four. There is some sort of equivalent for software, right? Yeah. Where you can prove these lines of code are secure. But the question is, the scale of even something like a browser is just so enormous. That's a very difficult thing to do.
Speaker 6Yes. Yeah. It's something that I think is being researched right now because this is, I think this is like one of the, one of the paths forward to make, to build more secure systems. Yeah. There are like, for example, you know, we've had systems where, you know, like the core of it is formally verified, right? It's an operating system that's formally verified, but then there are applications, you know, running like on these things and those applications that have issues, you know, like, and so it's, it's, it's complicated. And, you know, these are like small, like small systems, right? And you're talking about browser browsers, like, you know, many billions lines of code. And so that's, um, yeah, I mean, Ty can tell you how big Chrome is. I mean, they have like, Zillion.com. Yeah, I mean, they have like, Zillion.com. I mean, there's millions of people working on it and, you know, any, like lots of people working on Chrome security after all these years, but, uh, you know, it's, but long story short, it's, there are such thing, but, uh, to make it work on a browser or at a very, very large system, this is, it's, um, we don't have anything like that today.
Speaker 7Got it. I think there's a, there's a deeper reason here. You know, the reason like, uh, 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, uh, that's allows like software companies to adapt and to, to, uh, to learn much quicker than the rest of the world. You have a product, it 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, there's the, the, the tech companies are doing so well. So if you ask like, okay, now let's not change this like frequently, uh, then that's goes against the interest, right? And that's not going to happen. So it means that like, even if you have a way to formalize, uh, formally verify everything that will 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 like as quick as possible because that's how they do business.
Speaker 2This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChachiPT. I'm Carol Masser. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs, enhance their skills, and improve their skills. Hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in jobs that require a lot of time and energy. And that's why they're here. The job adds that candidates, quote, must be willing to work extended hours and weekends
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Speaker 5This 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?
Speaker 7Yeah, 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 user have upgrade 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 that we filed a bug, and then PHP produced a patch for that bug, that very, very moment, that information became public. Somebody who is watching the PHP, you know, repository on GitHub, they could like turn that away into an exploit within, you know, a few hours. Of course, like the vulnerability that we found was more complicated than that. But you can imagine that in principle, like the window between the patch was being developed, it's not ready yet, you know, for anybody, and before it's become ready for end user to upgrade. That's a window, right? Yeah. In the past, you know, the attacker has to wait until the patch become available. And then it will take them a long time to develop and exploit so user can have a 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 mirosoft 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 all of those important languages and if there is any sign of like oh there's a new vulnerability they're gonna like you know their ai would go pro and then you know bonding tokens so that changed the um yeah the practice right yeah i'm curious what
Speaker 1um 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 wong 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 he's like 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 don't just make 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
Speaker 7i don't think that it's simple to fix the sandbox that's that's the problem people think that you know maybe people are not insecure they think that there's a simple solution to cyber security just do this thing and you save and that's how we have so many problems you know vendors go out and tell people just buy this box this magic box yeah and put it in your network and you you'll be safe no it's not like that even that box has problems yeah you know 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 security even like the the firewalls that you buy they may have problems and they do and uh what i mean here is so what we found like the hugging face and open ai incident was uh fascinating right to to watch and it's difficult enterprise security is very difficult uh anybody saying like oh just buy this thing just do that thing you're gonna be safe no it's just like very complicated and the reason is like um and then people say oh just fix the model and that's a come back to the
Speaker 1model just make one
Speaker 7that doesn't hack that come 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 yeah of course and um the ai companies they're making money by uh selling tokens and most of the tokens are used for coding today like programming building things right and if you build if you want to be really good at coding you need uh an agent on ai that understand code understand technical problems can debug things can control computers but that's basically the definition of a hacker so you cannot really escape this you cannot have a cake and eat it too right you need to be good at coding then you have an ai that is good at hacking so unless you don't want to be good at coding then you have an ai that is good at hacking so unless you don't want to spend more tokens or you don't want to get into the coding business anymore you focus on like scientific discovery physical ai whatever then maybe you can not you know you can train a model that is not good at hacking uh anymore but as long as you want to automate knowledge work you know then eventually you must your ai must be able to use computer and control computer understand technical problems and that's definitely the definition of a hacker and that's the definition of someone like bruce so it's unavoidable so actually on
Speaker 5this note i'm curious can you just talk about what it's like being a hacker in the age of ai versus say even three or four years ago right like it's crazy how quickly stuff has shifted but how has your day-to-day changed yeah
Speaker 6well i'll just use some some background so like i wrote a textbook with some friends uh on reverse engineering it used to be like a book and i wrote a book and i wrote a book and i wrote a book and you know like you try to like reversing is the practice of you know understanding binary like software without any source code or hardware systems that used to be like uh i wrote this textbook and then i think with the advent of ai i think what like you know whatever nine months ago as of nine months ago like that entire book is deprecating it takes like you know two prompts or one prompt and then bam it will generate the textbook for you and it's even better you know and it took us you know a long time to write just to test it gives you an idea and then like i talked to friends who've been doing this for decades right like specialists in this area and they tell me that oh yeah man like i spend you know whatever five dollars on some open source model and it reverse engineered the firmware on you know some canon or like you know hp printer and it hacks it bruce you know and whereas before it would take me you know like months to figure some some stuff out you know that's just uh just to give you like the you know a glimpse into uh you know what's happening and you know what's happening and you know what's happening and you know how quickly things change well front you know like this guy um uh matt swish he's you know
Speaker 1yeah and he's dude
Speaker 5he's a friend of the show
Speaker 1from the long time a long time friend of the show multi-time guest yeah keep going we used to hang out in abu
Speaker 6dhabi oh okay yeah it's you know like i'm no matt false i mean like now he's like he shows he gave a talk to our team the other day and he showed his rack you know like in like um in his apartment and he's sitting there you know hacking stuff like while he's sitting there talking it's just insane like something that uh we have people that let's say you know for example like we've been hacking the iphone okay to build a full chain on the iphone it's not an easy task it's sometimes it takes several people to do this right there's um and our team was able to do this within like a few days you know as a one person and we have multiple of these chains it really compresses the the time like the the the exploitation of the time to to build um uh exploits um we see customers getting hacked uh by ai uh you know in the financials uh in the banks basically you know defenders cannot you know actually tell you why you tell these like these stories and you know just literally this has happened the last few weeks you know yeah like how things have changed
Speaker 7yeah basically we saw like you know in the uh open ai and hooking face incident they have one detail that that is very interesting uh i'm not sure if people notice but openly i note that like uh the people who handled incident on the open ai side they said that they have handled a lot of incidents but this is the first time they saw that you know an incident where you have like like a hundred points within your networks that were compromised at the same time yeah like there were a hundred like hackers within your system normally you have maybe one or two right now you have a hundred and i saw that i was like wow that was pretty interesting but maybe because open ai have lots of tokens so their agents can just go you know hack everything and then just two weeks ago we have like two clients in the banking industry and they got hacked and they called us to help them with like the incident response we came in because we do hacking as well we know like usually it took us like maybe a month or something once we come in a network and then took a month for us to spread out for the ai took like they came in they they broke the net they broke inside the network on monday by tuesday everywhere everywhere and like it's like cancer spread like at machine speed and it was like mind-blowing right because how could you defend against that like in in the past we we were telling our clients you know you have to invest in detection well what would how can you help yourself if you see it you can detect it but there's a hundred
Speaker 5of them noted we have a hundred hackers in our system right now it's not really helpful
Speaker 7exactly how could you do it right and then you have to shut down everything but shut down it's not an option because you are a bank so that's actually requires to sit down and think about how to redesign like defense system right what we have right now is not working very well but like to come back to your question like as a hacker you know how does it feel i love history so i always come back to history to say like does it did it happen before it actually did happen And, you know, with like chess, for example, you remember like in 1997, you know, IBM Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov. That was a big moment, right? And then 20 years later, AlphaGo defeated like Lizzie Doe in the game of Go. But those two moments are actually quite different. Like the first moment, the Deep Blue moment, after Deep Blue, the best chess player wasn't a computer. Because Deep Blue was a mainframe, right? Not something that you can run on your computer. And it took 10 years for someone to go from Deep Blue to develop a computer software that you can run on your computer that defeated everybody. But the 10 years, it took 10 years. During that 10 years, the best chess player was a centaur player. This is a term coined by Garry Kasparov. It's a combination of computer and human. It took 10 years. For AlphaGo, it took like three years. Like after AlphaGo, then 2019, somebody come up with a computer software that defeated anybody without any human input at all. At Calif, we think like, you know, we are entering the era of the centaur hackers. Basically, the best hacker right now is a combination of AI and humans. And, you know, our work and our friends' work as well show that AI is powerful. It can hack. It can hack anything. But it still requires, you know, a human expert to drive it, right? And we don't know how long this is going to last. Maybe three months. Maybe, you know, we come back here and like by the end of the year, we tell you we retire now. There's nothing else for us to do. Maybe it lasts like three years. And this is actually pretty exciting to find out. That's exactly what we want to do. And we think like there's like pessimism. Pessimism view, right? And AI is going to do everything. Let's just like retire and hate AI. Or you can see AI as a tool. It's like humanity just discovered fire. Yeah. And without fire, we wouldn't be here today. So, of course, we have to think about how to control fire. At the same time, a very important question that we need to ask is what should we cook, right? That's very important. And we want to find out what can we cook with AI. And how can we do it in a safe way that helps everybody.
Speaker 5Protein that makes our brains get bigger. Yeah. All right. Well, Ty and Bruce from Calif, thank you so much for coming on All Thoughts. That was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1You're both excellent. Thank you both.
Speaker 7Thanks. Thanks, Joe. Thanks, Rishi. Thank you.
Speaker 5Bye bye. We'll see you next time on All Thoughts, where we'll talk about how AI can help people get to where they want to be and how we can help people get to where they want to be.
Speaker 1And, you know, all this stuff about how, yes, you can have provably secure software, but it's small. You can't even do it for something that says the browser. I love that last point about how we're in the centaur age. Yeah. Where the strongest hacker is the computer working with a human, but that may not be there for much longer. And who knows how long that's going to be. Three months, a year. We have no idea. But the presumption should be that it won't last very long, et cetera.
Speaker 5Also, the idea of, like, a computer, an agent that can code is inherently. That's right. A hacker.
Speaker 1And so you can't just tell it.
Speaker 5Just tell it to be not. Not to hack, basically. Just teach it not to hack.
Speaker 1What's wrong with you? If coding is going to be big business, which it is, you're going to be building a lot of good hackers.
Speaker 5Yeah. And so the hackers proliferate. On that note, shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway.
Speaker 1You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand. Eshel Bennett at Dashbot. Cale Brooks at Cale Brooks. And Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And, of course, you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash oddlots. And for more oddlots content, you can check out our daily newsletter, which you can find at bloomberg.com slash oddlots.
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