Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 4.8
39a1873e5b
Ran the humanizer rules over 79 prose files in the active specs (brief, design, requirements, research and narrative docs). Removed em dashes, significance inflation, forced rule-of-three, bold-label list items and filler. Skipped tasks.md checklists and the retired specs (harnessx-*, openrouter-sast-harness, unseen-repo-evaluation). Every number, path, command, hash and identifier was preserved: checked each file against HEAD for drift in numbers, inline code and code fences, zero drift across all 79 files. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
2.4 KiB
Brief: search with proof
Maintainer, 2026-10-05, after reviewing Cairn (github.com/oritera/Cairn): "we are still not progressing through the state space search / not finding what we need and the progress is sort of slow ... i think something is missing." And: "I'd move to primarily executing in the cluster."
What was missing
Every detection step so far classifies: it scores one function excerpt and then tries to make the score precise enough to block. Calibration, Wilson bounds, pooled block gates, prompt variants and trained models all hit the same wall: ranking is decent (within-pair AUC about 0.76), but precision at the top cannot be proven to 95% on our data.
Cairn treats a security problem as a directed search with an objectively checkable goal. A shared board holds confirmed facts, open intents and human hints. A reasoner proposes independent intents; explorers with real tools each confirm one fact; the loop ends when the goal is demonstrably met.
Three things follow for OpenUltraSAST:
- An objective success condition. A finding is demonstrated when a test or proof of concept fails on the vulnerable code and passes on the fixed code (or, for a push, fails on head and passes on base where applicable). A demonstrated finding is right by construction; it needs no calibration and no training data, so it generalises to unseen repositories by construction.
- Exploration with tools. Agents that read other files, follow callers, build and run the code, instead of a single-shot judgement of one excerpt.
- Search state per repository and push. Facts and intents accumulate on a board instead of every question starting from zero.
Shape
- The cheap layers (quick rules, engine, classifier) become triage: they rank candidates.
- Agentic search runs only on the top-ranked candidates of a push, under a per-push budget.
- BLOCK only on a demonstrated finding. Advisory for plausible, unproven ones. "Could not demonstrate" is recorded as such, never as "not vulnerable".
- Execution is primarily in the kube-ax cluster: reason and explore steps are AX Tasks; the VM coordinates.
- Model access: a scoped, budget-limited key in the cluster, managed by the operator.
Not in scope
Copying Cairn code (AGPL-3.0; this repository is Apache-2.0). Offensive use against systems we do not own: all execution is against code under analysis, inside gVisor sandboxes.