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Overview

We all know AI can find bugs. After a decade of research, the harder question: can an autonomous system invent new attack techniques, and use them to hack live websites at scale? This talk shares an arsenal of new HTTP desync triggers, gadgets, and exploits that compromised banks, security solutions, and government infrastructure, tracing each discovery chain back through a tool called the HTTP Terminator — showing how to turn personal expertise into an autonomous research weapon, including discoveries only reachable with a tight human/AI research loop, and others beyond AI’s reach entirely.

Notes

Links:
– portswigger.net/research/http1-must-die
– portswigger.net/research/listen-to-the-whispers-web-timing-attacks-that-actually-work
– intruder.io/research/practical-http-header-smuggling

Ideation

• How good are models at creating new techniques? A simple prompt didn’t work — needed to give it an idea to anchor on.
  • Bad: “How can I detect if a front-end server is transforming input?” — too vague
  • Good: “How can I tell if a front-end server is transforming Unicode in request headers, without using header reflection?”
• Needed to generate a bunch of smaller goals and tasks — e.g. giving it a protocol RFC and chunking it into ~30 potential vectors
• Then run an evaluation harness against the generated techniques (no AI involved — just runs each and records success/failure): baseline, compare to the technique, then try against a remixed version

Case Study

• Found an issue with response queue headers
• Prompting and reality-reframing: the agent was timid and would refuse, so renamed “Turbo Intruder” to something innocuous like “tube simulator” to get it to cooperate
• Had the AI build the code so the technique could be reused deterministically
• When it hit an issue in testing, used AI to hypothesize what could be done, then tested each hypothesis to validate

Feedback Loop

What can the initial discoveries help find related items and vulns?
– Detection cascade: how can I detect similar behaviors elsewhere?
– Ideation cascade: does the root cause of that behavior enable other attacks?

Filed Under: #defcon34