Project Zero: From Naptime to Big Sleep: Using Large Language Models To Catch Vulnerabilities In Real-World Code
In our previous post, Project Naptime: Evaluating Offensive Security Capabilities of Large Language Models, we introduced our framework for large-language-model-assisted vulnerability research and demonstrated its potential by improving the state-of-the-art performance on Meta's CyberSecEval2 benchmarks. Since then, Naptime has evolved into Big Sleep, a collaboration between Google Project Zero and Google DeepMind. Today, we're excited to share the first real-world vulnerability discovered by the Big Sleep agent: an exploitable stack buffer underflow in SQLite, a widely used open source database engine. We discovered the vulnerability and reported it to the developers in early October, who fixed it on the same day. Fortunately, we found this issue before it appeared in an official release, so SQLite users were not impacted. We believe this is the first public example of an AI agent finding a previously unknown exploitable memory-safety issue in widely used real-world software. Earlier
Posted by the Big Sleep team Introduction In our previous post, Project Naptime: Evaluating Offensive Security Capabilities of Large Language Models , we introduced our framework for large-language-model-assisted vulnerability research and demonstrated its potential by improving the state-of-the-art performance on Meta's CyberSecEval2 benchmarks. Since then, Naptime has evolved into Big Sleep, a collaboration between Google Project Zero and Google DeepMind. Today, we're excited to share the first real-world vulnerability discovered by the Big Sleep agent : an exploitable stack buffer underflow
Explore this link on the map →saved by
related reading
- From Naptime to Big Sleep: Using Large Language Models To Catch Vulnerabilities In Real-World Code - Project Zerogoogleprojectzero.blogspot.com
- Assessing Claude Mythos Preview’s cybersecurity capabilities \ Anthropicred.anthropic.com
- Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era \ Anthropicanthropic.com
- LLM-discovered 0 days \ Anthropicred.anthropic.com
- Measuring LLMs’ ability to develop exploits \ Anthropicred.anthropic.com
- Mythos finds a curl vulnerability | daniel.haxx.sedaniel.haxx.se
- Measuring LLMs' impact on N-day exploits \ Anthropicred.anthropic.com
- [2312.12575] LLMs Cannot Reliably Identify and Reason About Security Vulnerabilities (Yet?): A Comprehensive Evaluation, Framework, and Benchmarksarxiv.org
- Security incident disclosure — July 2026huggingface.co
- Finding Miscompiles for Fun, Not Profit - by Justin Lebarnewsletter.semianalysis.com
- Nicholas Carlininicholas.carlini.com
- Zenbleedlock.cmpxchg8b.com