With suitable guidance, AI agents such as Claude Code are capable of
scanning effectively for potential vulnerabilities, and reporting them
in a concise and actionable format.
These tools are now widely available to malicious actors, and so any
vulnerabilities that they are capable of finding must be fixed now
before they are inevitably found and potentially exploited.
The recent batch of commits over the past week closes all potential
vulnerabilities that were detectable by either Opus 4.8 or Fable in
multiple passes over the code. No serious security impact was found,
and there is nothing that would merit a UEFI Secure Boot revocation.
A concrete threat model is now documented, along with the explicit
bounds contracts for several internal APIs (such as ASN.1 parsing and
I/O buffer pointer manipulation). Some entire classes of nominal
defect (e.g. technically undefined behaviour arising from constant
left shifts into the sign bit) have been eliminated. False positives
that were raised several times and that could not be silenced through
reporting guidelines were fixed in the code, even when the code change
had no real-world impact. It is now possible to ask an appropriately
instructed AI agent to search for vulnerabilities in the iPXE codebase
and to be reasonably confident that anything that it reports is worth
investigating further.
Add a security policy to formally document the expectations upon both
humans and AI agents in terms of reporting potential vulnerabilities,
and update the contribution guidelines to grant a limited exception to
the blanket ban on AI-generated text.
Signed-off-by: Michael Brown <mcb30@ipxe.org>
