For even the most skilled hackers, it can take at least an hour to write a script to exploit a software vulnerability and infiltrate their target. Soon, a machine may be able to do it in mere seconds.
When OpenAI last week released its ChatGPT tool, allowing users to interact with an artificial intelligence chatbot, computer security researcher Brendan Dolan-Gavitt wondered whether he could instruct it to write malicious code. So, he asked the model to solve a simple capture-the-flag challenge.
The result was nearly remarkable. ChatGPT correctly recognized that the code contained a buffer overflow vulnerability and wrote a piece of code exploiting the flaw. If not for a minor error — the number of characters in the input — the model would have solved the problem perfectly.
