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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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The recent React code execution bug seems expose the current shallow reasoning behaviour of LLMs. So the react framework has had a serious security issue recently involving serialisation which apparently can cause arbitrary code execution. Some people have tried to generate exploits based on the patch using LLMs but this has failed. For example: https://github.com/ejpir/CVE-2025-55182-research/blob/main/TECHNICAL-ANALYSIS.md which assumes that the server would whitelist very unsafe modules for remote access (https://react2shell.com/). Of course the criticism of the LLM in the situation should be taken with a grain of salt because whoever is driving the LLM seems to have no idea what they are doing. It might be possible that someone who knows what they are doing is able to drive the LLM to a solution, but then question is how useful is the LLM. One advantage of the LLM in this situation is it allows someone with very little context of React and their bizzaro RPC protocols to quickly generate valid payloads that would generate weird behaviour and this could be used to generate a chain that would lead to code execution.

Without saying too much I'll say I've been part of an effort by my employer to use LLMs to identify security issues. They do a good job analyzing pieces of code in isolation for particular issues but a limited context window prevents them from finding end to end issues. For example, the LLM might flag that there's no input validation for function XYZ, but that's because the input validation happened much earlier in the scenario. Thinking about this the reverse way, generating exploits, probably means assuming that you've gotten the payload you want in the place where it will be parsed how you want which can often be the hard part.


As an aside Jesus Christ this is ugly code. I am very glad the brief time I spent working with Javascript was with Typescript.

This is just grifters and idiots who don't know how to code and got a claude pro subscription and think they can be the next great super hacker. In fact they are worse than the script kiddies of the old days.

You at least have to know about computer security in general as a concept to even be able to ask the ai the right question. But even if you do, eVen the best models have no shortage of hallucinations and lazy behavior.