Everyone keeps asking whether manual bug bounty hunting is still worth\u00a0it.<\/p>\n
The answers usually go one of two\u00a0ways.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI is going to replace hunters.\u201d<\/p>\n
Or:<\/p>\n
\u201cAI can never replace human intuition.\u201d<\/p>\n
Honestly, I think both answers are a little\u00a0lazy.<\/p>\n
AI is already very good at a lot of the work hunters used to spend hours doing. Give it a large codebase and it can scan for patterns, trace functions, spot suspicious behaviour, generate test cases and come back with a list of things worth looking\u00a0at.<\/p>\n
So no, I don\u2019t think the future of bug hunting is someone opening a repository and manually reading every contract for eight\u00a0hours.<\/p>\n
That sounds less like a competitive advantage and more like refusing to use better\u00a0tools.<\/p>\n
Finding something weird isn\u2019t the same as finding a\u00a0bug.<\/p>\n
You can get an AI to point at a suspicious function pretty easily. The harder question is whether an attacker can actually reach that state, whether the behaviour can be exploited, and whether it causes anything meaningful.<\/p>\n
This matters even more in\u00a0Web3.<\/p>\n
A contract can look perfectly fine by itself and still have a problem because of how it interacts with an oracle, another contract, liquidity, transaction ordering or some economic assumption.<\/p>\n
Sometimes the bug isn\u2019t in the\u00a0code.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s in the assumption behind the\u00a0code.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the stuff I don\u2019t think you can solve by simply throwing a better scanner at the repository.<\/p>\n
This is probably the unpopular part of my\u00a0opinion.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think manual bug hunting is going\u00a0away.<\/p>\n
I think manual-only<\/strong> bug hunting is going to become increasingly inefficient.<\/p>\n If a tool can scan thousands of lines in minutes, identify interesting paths and generate ten hypotheses for me, I\u2019m going to use\u00a0it.<\/p>\n Why wouldn\u2019t\u00a0I?<\/p>\n I\u2019d rather spend that saved time trying to break the protocol than proving that I can manually search through Solidity.<\/p>\n The workflow I\u2019d actually want is pretty\u00a0simple:<\/p>\n Let AI cover more of the boring surface-level work.Pick the interesting findings\u00a0myself.Try to break the assumptions behind\u00a0them.Reproduce the\u00a0exploit.Figure out the actual\u00a0impact.Then write the\u00a0report.<\/p>\n The important part isn\u2019t who typed the first\u00a0query.<\/p>\n It\u2019s who figured out that the finding was actually worth pursuing.<\/p>\n There\u2019s another thing I think people underestimate.<\/p>\n AI is going to make it much easier to submit bad bug\u00a0reports.<\/p>\n Not necessarily because people are trying to cheat. Sometimes the model will simply convince them that something is a vulnerability when it\u00a0isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n So we\u2019re probably going to get more reports, more duplicates and more convincing-looking false positives.<\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t make bug bounty hunting less valuable.<\/p>\n It makes good validation<\/strong> more valuable.<\/p>\n If everyone can generate findings, the interesting person becomes the one who can take a suspicious result and turn it into a working exploit with a clear\u00a0impact.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a very different skill from just finding something that looks\u00a0wrong.<\/p>\n Yes.<\/p>\n But if your definition of manual hunting is \u201cI don\u2019t use AI or automation because real hunters do everything themselves,\u201d I don\u2019t think that\u2019s going to age particularly well.<\/p>\n The best researchers won\u2019t necessarily be the ones doing the most manual\u00a0work.<\/p>\n They\u2019ll probably be the ones using machines to cover more ground while keeping the actual judgment for themselves.<\/p>\n AI can tell you where something looks\u00a0wrong.<\/p>\n It still takes a good researcher to\u00a0decide:<\/p>\n \u201cOkay. Now let\u2019s see if I can actually break\u00a0it.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n And I think that\u2019s where bug hunting gets interesting.<\/p>\n Manual Bug Hunting Isn\u2019t Dead. But \u201cManual-Only\u201d Might Be.<\/a> was originally published in Coinmonks<\/a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Everyone keeps asking whether manual bug bounty hunting is still worth\u00a0it. The answers usually go one of two\u00a0ways. \u201cAI is going to replace hunters.\u201d Or: \u201cAI can never replace human intuition.\u201d Honestly, I think both answers are a little\u00a0lazy. AI is already very good at a lot of the work hunters used to spend hours […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":237263,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237262"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=237262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/237263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=237262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=237262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=237262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}And there\u2019s going to be a lot more\u00a0garbage<\/h3>\n
So, is manual bug hunting still worth\u00a0it?<\/h3>\n