I have a large token budget as part of my work. A coworker was scanning some repos for vulnerabilities as a test. He found a scary looking remote exploit in a popular project and shared it with me for a second opinion. I spun up a local instance of the project and ran the POC against it: nothing. Turns out it needed some configuration knobs tweaked to lower some security protections.
So I told the AI what happened, and asked it to fix the POC so that it would work with the default configuration. It chewed away at that for a few minutes until it cheerfully patched the POC into a weaponized version. I ran it. The local instance, which I had just downloaded, compiled myself, and launched with the default config file, immediately crashed.
I got the cold sweats. I've read this novel. I've seen this movie. Wow. I have a blinking cursor on the console of a nuclear information bomb. I tossed and turned all night, got about half an hour of actual sleep, and probably looked like I'd seen a ghost at work the next day.
On the plus side, it gave our team some very clear ethical and moral guidance: we're going to do this, and we're going to share our findings with the relevant authors, because we can. Because I want to live in a world where the good guys are trying to fix problems before the bad guys can find them, I decided to help build that world. It was like, well, I guess this is what I'm doing now.
Sorry, what does POC mean in this context? I don’t see an earlier combination of words for which that would be an initialism.
proof of concept
Yep. It's the term for basically a demonstration of a claim. "Huh, this part of the program code looks like it's vulnerable to a buffer overflow, so I'll write a script designed to get the malicious data into the right place inside the programs dataflow pathway to prove that it's actually vulnerable."
You can have a perfectly legitimate, critical vulnerability without providing a working POC. However, then it's up to debate. "Is it really a problem? Is it even possible to sneak the payload past the various checks to get it into position? Hmm, it's hart to tell... perhaps it isn't." But show up with a working POC and it's hard to argue that it's not a real vulnerability. "I don't think that's actually reachable." "Boom, crash." "Oh. I guess it is."