exposure is unchanged. automated patching and upgrades are working. rollbacks, etc are working. minimal attack surface exposed and properly blocking traffic by geography. rotation of keys/passwords as well as short lived rotated TLS certs.

not one of those things alone is a solution, but together can make a solid dent in securing your infrastructure.

Answering the titular question, why would the advent of AI-found vulnerabilities substantially change one’s threat model? Before LLMs, the prospect of an undiscovered vulnerability was non-zero probability then, so what exactly has changed now?

In terms of attacker capabilities, it would be a mistake to solely observe that attackers now have LLMs and conclude that this means the threat landscape has changed. The use of LLMs does not magically create a root escalation where one does not or cannot exist. Part of your threat model should include defense-in-depth mitigations, so that when (not if) an attacker finds a 0-day exploit, they are severely limited in gained functionality on your machines. In the simplest cases, jails or containers serve to keep separate the web-facing processes. VM isolation would be a further step, because an attacked cannot gain machine control without both a software exploit as well as a VM escape route. People hosting services can and should expect that their front line defense will fall, so they better have more defenses in place.

Phrased another way, the people who have done their threats analysis properly and have accepted the residual risk of hosting their own services that face the web, should not really be additionally perturbed by AI advances. This isn’t the same caliber of landscape change as would, say, the invention of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer. If the worst thing that can happen to your home IRC server is that it gets flooded by a script kiddie, AI does not mean your server can now burst into flames.

Much like with human hygiene, some basic rules are unusually effective against most threats. The equivalent to washing one’s hands is to stay on top of system and software updates. Institutionally funding the organizations (eg PHP Foundation, curl, USA CDC) so they can fix these problems would also help.

not at home but i work as a software dev for a very big company you heard of and all we do noe is fix ai found security bugs. hell the stuff i work on isnt that public and we are still fixing. i can only imagine what the team of the public website are handling.

I don’t expose much, just an always-on VPN. My HTML only site lives on vps, from which i can cut-and-run anytime. I don’t have much need for more, really.

Back when I was working more with raw infosec stuff like packet analysis, etc, I thought surely we would see machine learning in every router to dynamically manage firewalls in such a way that they became foregone conclusions. We don’t really have that, but code has sure changed, and you’re right, we will see lots more vulns discovered and exploited at a much faster pace.

I’ve always treated my home server with public facing services as presumptively compromised. I don’t put any data on there I wouldn’t want to see become public, and any data I actually care about losing is backed up to the cloud with an append-only key. The NixOS config lives in a git repo not on the server. If something bad happens, I can wipe the machine clean, redeploy the image, restore my backups, and we’re back to the status quo.

So, my threat model hasn’t changed much!

I have HTTP(s) exposed, plus a wireguard port. HTTP points at a traefik gateway running in a kubernetes environment, based on hardened talos and using cilium network policies to isolate and direct traffic. I know that I am not super safe, but given this weeks news I think the only way to be truly safe in terms of cybersecurity is to use paper notebooks, snail mail and a subscription to the local print newspaper and no digital services whatsoever. In other words: how certain can we be that tailscale, or wireguard in general, or any other securit tool isn‘t suddenly at risk? Can we live with that risk? There always was a trade-off you had to make. Unfortunately „just use lets-encrypt, fail2ban and key-auth for ssh“ isn‘t really cutting it anymore.

If tailscale gets compromised I’m fucked. Otherwise I won’t be opening anything else up given my limited experience.