Speedrunners are vulnerability researchers, they just don't know it yet

The metaphor is a bit stretched for the purposes of content marketing a startup. The major difference between vulnerability researchers and the speedrunning community is that speedrunning is highly collaborative and open. There are massive speedrunning Discord communities for each game, and even before Discord existed, tricks and hacks were discovered iteratively just by many people watching other people do them often unintentionally and trying to figure out how they work (a common trend in every Summoning Salt video).

Nintendo doesn't care if people find ACE in decade-old games (usually) and post decompiled versions of games on GitHub so people can find out how they tick, but vulnerability researchers can't do that unless they want to risk causing a legal shitstorm.

I think if they're active in the speedrunning community, then they're already well aware of this! And for a fun additional example to add to this article, you can often find TAS'ers talking about arbitrary code execution. The legendary GDQ run of TASBot's alternate ending to OoT[0] utiziling an ACE exploit they found in that game absolutely blew me away.

[0] https://youtu.be/PNbkv_DJ0f0?t=3112

I've wondered myself why there's so little overlap between these two closely related interests of mine. Some of it seems to be the "But I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs." effect, where some of the people working on exploiting games ONLY care about what can be done in their one game of interest - it doesn't always generalize to interest in using the same techniques against everything else.

Of course there's also the fact that exploiting 20-30 year old games is just vastly easier than modern software, due to the total lack of mitigations in them. And that's on top of the fact that with popular games, you're building on decades of reverse engineering work rather than (potentially) starting from scratch. And the arguably superior toolset (savestates etc).

But I think a very big factor is the one this blogpost is trying to address - most people just don't know anything at all about the vuln research industry, which is not exactly searching for attention in the ways that speedruns broadcast to hundreds of thousands of viewers for charity are.

This is absolutely and obviously true. Vulnerability researchers watch tool-assisted speedrun videos with jealousy. Side-note: when we did Microcorruption, game devs outperformed everybody but elite vuln researchers.

I watched the world record speedrun of Subnautica the other day and someone was kind enough to have posted a comment with a full list of all the bugs he exploited to beat the game in 28 minutes.

It was quite mind boggling. When I played the game I barely encountered a single bug or glitch - it seemed pretty polished! - but in actual fact there were 100’s of outstanding bugs, years after the game’s release and multiple updates.

The important distinction, and where the comparison might fall short as the job-advertisement purpose of this post, is motivation. Speedrunners enjoy games because games are fun. Speedrunners get to actually use these vulnerabilities in a way that is meaningful in their lives, whereas vulnerability researchers typically don't.

This is an observation about cyber security in general, but in my experience, bug hunting and reverse engineering require a lot of tenacity at a level that writing software and other areas of IT do not. I think tenacity is a difficult thing to summon if your only tangible motivation is a salary, the target software is intrinsically boring, and you know that you'll be rewarded whether or not you find the bugs.

Interesting article!

Though it's too bad that cyber security is not as intrinsically fun and interesting to a lot of speed runners as video games. A large part of what allows speedrunners to spend hours searching for glitches and exploits in these games is that they're having an absolute blast while doing it! Also exploiting glitches in decades old games is generally pretty accessible and doesn't have a high barrier to entry like cyber security.

At its most extreme, this crossover gets you things like arbitrary code execution on Super Mario World.

EDIT: There was supposed to be a link here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnZ2NNYySuE

I'm a speedrunner, and I'm pretty sure this is well known -- and accepted as standard in some categories! It's a pretty well accepted standard (to the point of the headline being almost a mild offense!).

In the gaming world, undefined software behavior is critical to this sort of thing, we see this especially in some games like the legendary exploits found in the Ocarina of Time speedruns for example.

I mean, in Super Mario World, SethBling did code injection to manually run a version of Flappy Bird (how ironic given the origin of the pipes!) in the game. By hand. No savestates. It took forever and the run through is really and truly fascinating: https://youtu.be/hB6eY73sLV0?si=nIP07o_fa6O9rauW

I speedrun things other than games as well -- and so the generalization is not just that we are security researchers, we are people who fundamentally learn the "shape" of a thing very, very well, and ways that this shape can be used to get from one state on that shape to another.

In conclusion -- yes, it can be something as simple as security research! But the joy and the beauty of speedrunning is something so much bigger and beautiful than that -- though it certainly is one outcome that can be had!

Opens with an AI-generated image, I'm gonna assume the text is from the same source and close the tab.

This is an interesting premise. I especially like framing speed runners as researchers

Antithesis is using this idea to improve its bug-finding product: https://antithesis.com/blog/zelda/