Cyber Risks · PortSwigger Research

The beast needs a cage: What's next for App Sec post-Mythos

Summary: PortSwigger's Dafydd Stuttard writes that the traditional AppSec value chain of finding, proving, and fixing vulnerabilities will be automatable end-to-end, and that open-weight models will likely match today's frontier capabilities within a few months. He argues LLMs are non-deterministic and cannot self-govern, so agentic offensive tooling needs a deterministic safety and governance layer with human-in-the-loop decisions and audit trails, and he cites James Kettle's agentic implementation of his research methodology finding a novel attack technique and stealing an API key from a bank while he slept.

What's compelling: Stuttard's point is that as model capability gaps close, the structural limitations get more significant, not less - more capable models take bigger, more consequential actions with less oversight. An agent that compromised a bank overnight without its operator knowing the target was in scope is the concrete stake for anyone planning to hand offensive tooling to a model.

Read the original at PortSwigger Research ↗

Topics
Vulnerabilities & Patching
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