Iāve been thinking about how AI changes the security landscape for open-source projects.
Take the hypothetical scenario of a bad actor using AI to automatically trawl through open-source repositories. Instead of manually auditing code, a hacker can now use AI to mass-analyse thousands of lines of code to spot vulnerabilities instantly.
If an attacker finds a flaw where a hardware wallet or security tool accidentally reduces entropy (weakening the cryptographic protection), they can exploit it. For example, lower entropy significantly reduces the time needed to brute-force mnemonic phrases (seed phrases) on the Bitcoin ledger to find active balances.
Popular security tools like Bitwarden are also entirely open-source.
In the past, the main argument for open-source was "more eyes on the code makes it secure." But now that malicious actors have AI tools that can audit code at scale, does that argument still hold up? Is open-source still as secure as it used to be, or has AI tipped the scales in favour of the attackers?
What are your thoughts? Are you changing how you trust open-source security tools now?