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PT Philip Tricca On Oxide and Friends

“These are like, in a way, kind of like nuclear weapons, where there are entire industries of incredibly intelligent and experienced people that would spend tons of time hunting for these things. And in a matter of 10 minutes, an LLM can take an old code base, flip it over and shake all the change out of it.”

Oxide and Friends · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026

“These are like, in a way, kind of like nuclear weapons, where there are entire industries of incredibly intelligent and experienced people that would spend tons of time hunting for these things. And in a matter of 10 minutes, an LLM can take an old code base, flip it over and shake all the change out of it.” — Philip Tricca, Oxide and Friends

Bryan Cantrill had just remarked on how good LLMs have become at finding sophisticated vulnerabilities, putting what used to be state-level attacks in far more hands. Tricca agrees, and says old firmware like UEFI suffers most because it was designed for very different times.

Transcript

Oxide and Friends Around 1:14:00 into the episode
Philip Tricca

…very far out. But the goal is to be as transparent as possible. That's right. To give people primitives so that they can build systems where they don't blindly trust these types of things. And this is it. And we had customers that wanted it. And so now we're exposing it up to the virtual machines.

Bryan Cantrill

…putting these kind of, what were formerly kind of state actor level attacks in potentially much broader hands. So it's like, I feel, I mean, it must feel like vindicating, not that you needed it, but like the security at this layer of the stack has become much more important, even in the last year.

Philip Tricca

Yeah, this is, these are weird times. Like these are really interesting times on this front. These are like, in a way, kind of like nuclear weapons, where there are entire industries of incredibly intelligent and experienced people that would spend tons of time hunting for these things. And in a matter of 10 minutes, an LLM can take an old code base, flip it over and shake all the change out of it. It is, and this is where things like UEFI really suffer is because they are from, and they were designed in very different times.

Speaker 4

Very different times.

Philip Tricca

And the incentive, unfortunately, is a bit upside down there. Like the incentive for people to change that is very low. And the people that care about it are very few. Now, of course, people care about it when it goes wrong, but most of the time, like people aren't doing the risk analysis that says…

Bryan Cantrill

And I think to the degree that we're now all signing up in the light cone reserves, Adam, to defend the light against our robot overlords, this kind of security becomes really important because this is the kind of the physical security of the system. And I do think, I mean, I think it's honestly…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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