alt Hacker NewsWe recently wrote about moving away from OVMF (~1M lines of C) to very minimal and hyperspecific firmware (300 lines of assembly)[1] for our specific confidential VM machine targets, and the idea that "popular" does not automatically mean "secure". You can point an LLM at any large codebase and it will find vulnerabilities, so "patch the planet" isn't very scalable. You can instead just write hyperspecific, small codebases and throw all the security practices at it - like LLMs (economical if it's small), fuzzing, formal methods etc.
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>You can point an LLM at any large codebase and it will find vulnerabilities, so "patch the planet" isn't very scalable.
So the solutions need to be structural.
e.g. relative to a monolith kernel, seL4 is small, has no known bugs (AI can try, but so far crickets) and is the only piece that needs to run privileged.
Everything running under seL4 benefits from the guarantees seL4 provides.
Yea I really like this idea.
We need a clean start. A lot of layers can and should be rebuilt, and even if you do it without reducing functionality, I feel like in a lot of cases like we’ll be able to cut down the code significantly.
When I explain software bloat to non technical people, I say imagine you built a 10 story building, but every few years it was a story at a time with the renovations along the way.
Like there’s gonna be a lot of inefficiencies. Yea I know we refactor. But doing a clean slate rebuild. Knowing exactly what you need based on real world experience, it should work to really streamline stuff.
I've been thinking similarly, that we're quickly going to want to start minimising dependencies and code size in the programs we make to try to reduce attack surface area.