Bitcoin Core adjusts vulnerability disclosure policy to address AI vulnerability exploitation

Bitcoin core developer Antoine Poinsot announced an adjustment to the security vulnerability disclosure policy in the Bitcoin development mailing list. He stated that in the past, vulnerabilities were often kept secret for a long time to allow users to complete upgrades before details were made public, but this also led to fixes not being backported to older versions, requiring users to wait for the next major release. Poinsot pointed out that large language models make some vulnerabilities very easy to rediscover, and the protection that continued delays in fixing can provide is now quite limited.

According to the new policy, vulnerabilities deemed "easy to discover" will be fixed as soon as possible in all maintained major versions, with security announcements released simultaneously. This classification applies to vulnerabilities that can be discovered with minimal effort, such as through simple LLM prompts. Other vulnerabilities will still follow the disclosure timeline based on severity: low-severity vulnerabilities will be disclosed two weeks after the major release containing the fix; medium to high-severity vulnerabilities will be disclosed two weeks after the last affected version reaches its end of life (usually one year after the fix is released in a new major version). Critical vulnerabilities are not covered by the standard policy and may require ad hoc procedures.

Bitcoin ecosystem security researcher Luke de Wolf stated that he previously disagreed with Poinsot's security strategy but believes this update is a good adjustment. In August of this year, the volunteer-based Bitcoin Red Team reported nearly 5,000 potential issues across 390 projects, with only about one-fifth being reproducible at that time. In the same month, Core Lightning developers urged operators to upgrade or take nodes offline after receiving multiple AI-generated vulnerability reports, while keeping technical details confidential for two weeks.