What happens when AI models take aim at ICS exploits

LLMs have shown great improvement in vulnerability research and exploit development capabilities over the past six months. But it’s one thing to find vulnerabilities in well documented open-source projects and an entirely different skillset to decrypt file systems and reverse-engineer closed-source low-level firmware in highly specialized embedded devices.

That’s why researchers from industrial IoT security firm Forescout set out to test how far AI models have come to replacing the highly specialized knowledge that industrial control system (ICS) vulnerability researchers possess. Using AI assistance to port a known exploit from one model of programmable logic controllers (PLCs) to another took 8. 5 hours and still required significant input from the human researcher.