btw, this is exactly why the openai disclosure felt threatening to us. when a ciso starts the conversation angry, of course researchers panic. something like this CFAA can be invoked, authorization boundaries can be disputed, and suddenly you’re talking to lawyers. did we cross a boundary? anyone who used codex on cloud can tell its harmless what we did. we deliberately did not download sensitive internal information, we proved repo access with a harmless pr and stopped. a ciso absolutely should ask what happened, ask us to stop, preserve logs, investigate, and verify whether anything sensitive was accessed, that’s indeed their job. but once you establish that this was good-faith research, responsibly disclosed, with deliberate effort to minimize access, continuing to treat the researcher like an adversary achieves what exactly? if the anger is because the bug is embarrassing, it doesn’t need to be. serious vulnerabilities can become great security stories, google does this all the time. if it’s about the boundary, investigate it. establish what happened. then move forward if it’s responsibly done researchers should leave responsible disclosure thinking “i’m glad i told them” not “i need a lawyer.”

this was me few years back, the pain of approaching a new target and writing an n-day exploit used to be a lot. i would spend days just understanding all the new things the target had implemented(like the v8 sandbox, windows exp here)then more days figuring out everything else and improvising around it. it was literal grunt work, but it was beautiful, time would just disappear, you had a clear goal, you got feedback at every step, and you kept hillclimbing until you got there. i had some of the most fun in my life doing this kind of work. unfortunately, that is changing now, i don't need to spend my time on this, this is all just largely automated.