(I don’t see what this being reported during the Christmas holidays has to do with not revealing the disclosure and patch timeline, a “note that delays should be attributed to Christmas” would have sufficed.)
Is the FFmpeg Twitter account managed by a developer's teenage son? No matter what point that they try convey, it's always stated in an obnoxious manner.
Maybe they should hire Mario Nawfal for their announcements:
"""
BREAKING: AI FOUND VULNERABILITY IN FFMPEG!
After decades of human struggle, humans no longer call the shots.
Pwno decided to take the leap. They did not just find a vulnerability---they found a BOMBSHELL! What took developers weeks to write, AI analyzed in SECONDS!
"""
This is another drawback of security research, but one that had already existed before "AI" with ossfuzz.
You basically cannot commit in public to the main branch and audit and test everything 3 months before a release, because any error can be picked up, will be publicized and go into the official statistics.
There are no "official" statistics. None of this matters. If we judged projects by the number of security holes they had, then no one would be using ffmpeg, which had hundreds of serious vulns.
Vulnerability research is useful insofar that the bad guys are using the same techniques (e.g., the same fuzzing tools), so any bugs you squash make it harder for others to attack you. If your enemy is a nation state, they might still pack your laptop / phone / pager with explosives, but the bar for that is higher than popping your phone with a 0-day.
Vulnerability research is demonstrably not useful for improving the security of the ecosystem in the long haul. That's where sandboxing, hardening, and good engineering hygiene come into play. If you're writing a browser or a video decoder in C/C++, you're going to have exploitable bugs.
> Vulnerability research is demonstrably not useful for improving the security of the ecosystem in the long haul. That's where sandboxing, hardening, and good engineering hygiene come into play. If you're writing a browser or a video decoder in C/C++, you're going to have exploitable bugs.
IMHO, vulnerability research is the stick that drives the ecosystem towards all those things. Reports of vulnerabilities in the codec for Rebel Assult videos (or whatever) leads one to disable codecs other than those they need. Reports of vulnerabilities in playlist support leads one to disable playlist support where it's unnecessary and run transcodes in a chroot sandbox with no network access. Reports of buffer oveflows leads one to prefer implementation in memory safe languages where available with sufficient performance and also to sandbox when possible.
We all know that LLMs were used to find these vulnerabilities, specifically on high impact projects. That's fine.
However, my only question is who actually provided the patch: The maintainers of FFmpeg? The LLM that is being used? Or the security researchers themselves after finding the issue?
It seems that these two statements about the issue are in conflict:
> We found and patched 6 memory vulnerabilities in FFmpeg in two days.
PWNO provided a patch but it was rejected for being too large[1]. A maintainer fixed it himself[2]. I don't know if PWNO used a LLM but it seems clear that the maintainer had a preferred specific style in mind so it was likely hand written (albeit inspired by the initial patch).
They pitch their company as finding bugs "with AI". It's not hard to point one of the coding agents at a repo URL and have it find bugs even in code that's been in the wild for a long time, looking at their list that looks likely to be what they're doing.
The list is pretty short though for 8 months. ossfuzz has found a lot more even with the fuzzers often not covering a lot of the code base.
Manually paying people to write fuzzers by hand would yield a lot more and be less expensive than data centers and burning money, but who wants to pay people in 2026?
I can't speak to what exactly this team is doing but I haven't seen any evidence that with-robot finds less bugs than without-robot. I do have some experience in this area.
(I don’t see what this being reported during the Christmas holidays has to do with not revealing the disclosure and patch timeline, a “note that delays should be attributed to Christmas” would have sufficed.)
This specific issue is fixed here https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/commit/4bfac71ecd96488dd2dc...
> Seeing as this has made the orange site, let it be known this person is a model security researcher.
> The issue was not in any FFmpeg release, and a report was sent three days after a new code was added to FFmpeg Git.
> There was no big CVE ADVISORY "MUH SECURITEH" "you need to fix this now or you will be hacked and the world will end" associated with the report.
""" BREAKING: AI FOUND VULNERABILITY IN FFMPEG!
After decades of human struggle, humans no longer call the shots.
Pwno decided to take the leap. They did not just find a vulnerability---they found a BOMBSHELL! What took developers weeks to write, AI analyzed in SECONDS! """
You basically cannot commit in public to the main branch and audit and test everything 3 months before a release, because any error can be picked up, will be publicized and go into the official statistics.
There are no "official" statistics. None of this matters. If we judged projects by the number of security holes they had, then no one would be using ffmpeg, which had hundreds of serious vulns.
Vulnerability research is useful insofar that the bad guys are using the same techniques (e.g., the same fuzzing tools), so any bugs you squash make it harder for others to attack you. If your enemy is a nation state, they might still pack your laptop / phone / pager with explosives, but the bar for that is higher than popping your phone with a 0-day.
Vulnerability research is demonstrably not useful for improving the security of the ecosystem in the long haul. That's where sandboxing, hardening, and good engineering hygiene come into play. If you're writing a browser or a video decoder in C/C++, you're going to have exploitable bugs.
IMHO, vulnerability research is the stick that drives the ecosystem towards all those things. Reports of vulnerabilities in the codec for Rebel Assult videos (or whatever) leads one to disable codecs other than those they need. Reports of vulnerabilities in playlist support leads one to disable playlist support where it's unnecessary and run transcodes in a chroot sandbox with no network access. Reports of buffer oveflows leads one to prefer implementation in memory safe languages where available with sufficient performance and also to sandbox when possible.
We all know that LLMs were used to find these vulnerabilities, specifically on high impact projects. That's fine.
However, my only question is who actually provided the patch: The maintainers of FFmpeg? The LLM that is being used? Or the security researchers themselves after finding the issue?
It seems that these two statements about the issue are in conflict:
> We found and patched 6 memory vulnerabilities in FFmpeg in two days.
> Dec, 2025: avcodec/exif maintainer provided patch.
1. https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/pulls/21258
2. https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/commit/4bfac71ecd96488...
How do we know that? You seem quite certain.
Manually paying people to write fuzzers by hand would yield a lot more and be less expensive than data centers and burning money, but who wants to pay people in 2026?