Measuring LLMs' impact on N-day exploits

This post details Anthropic's evaluation of LLMs' impact on N-day exploit development. It quantifies the ability of models like Claude Mythos Preview to autonomously generate code-execution exploits from security patches. The evaluation covers both Firefox (with source code) and Windows kernel (without source code) vulnerabilities. For Firefox, Mythos Preview built 8 working code-execution exploits from 18 patches and demonstrated high consistency in generating PoC crashes. For Windows kernel vulnerabilities, it produced 8 full exploit chains for privilege escalation from 21 local elevation-of-privilege bugs, even without source code. The post highlights the acceleration of exploit development, reducing the bottleneck of reverse engineering expertise and posing a greater threat during the 'patch gap'.