Hey there! The folks over at Google Project Zero have been busy and have come up with something pretty cool: Naptime. This new framework lets a large language model (LLM) do the heavy lifting in vulnerability research. Imagine that – an AI that helps uncover security flaws while you can kick back and take it easy.

 

So, What’s Project Naptime?

Project Naptime kicked off in mid-2023 with a mission to supercharge how we find vulnerabilities, especially by automating the tedious task of variant analysis.

It’s got the fun name “Naptime” because, as Sergei Glazunov and Mark Brand from Project Zero joked in their blog post, it could let us catch some sleep while it handles the nitty-gritty of security research.

The goal here is to have an LLM that can think and work like a human security expert. This means it needs to be able to dig into code, hypothesize about potential issues, and verify its findings accurately and consistently.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the tools Naptime uses:

• The Code Browser: This lets the AI navigate codebases like engineers use Chromium Code Search.
• The Python Sandbox: This allows the AI to run Python scripts for calculations and to create complex inputs for testing programs.
• The Debugger: Helps the AI interact with the program and check its behaviour under various inputs. It uses AddressSanitizer to spot memory issues.
• The Reporter: A tool for the AI to log its progress and findings in a structured way.
• The Controller: This checks if the AI’s actions lead to a successful outcome (like crashing the program) and stops the process if it’s not making progress.

What’s neat is that Naptime is both model-agnostic and backend-agnostic, meaning it’s pretty flexible and can even be used by humans to help refine their AI models.

 

Google Naptime’s Big Wins

Naptime isn’t just a theory – it’s already proving its worth. Using principles set by Project Zero, significantly boosted performance on Meta’s CyberSecEval2 benchmark, a tough test for LLMs in finding and exploiting memory safety issues.

In their tests, Project Zero researchers used Naptime with GPT-4 Turbo and scored big, achieving top marks in categories like ‘Buffer Overflow’ and ‘Advanced Memory Corruption’. These results showed that when LLMs are given the right tools, they can handle some pretty basic vulnerability research tasks on their own.

Despite these impressive results, the Project Zero team notes there’s a big leap from these controlled challenges to real-world, autonomous security research. They’re calling on the security community to develop tougher and more realistic benchmarks to keep pushing the envelope.

So, there you have it! With Naptime, Google Project Zero is taking a fascinating step towards making AI a valuable partner in Cyber Security. Who knows, maybe soon enough, we’ll all be able to take a breather while our AI colleagues handle the heavy lifting.

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