Bitcoin Core has revised its security disclosure policy to fast-track fixes for vulnerabilities that large language models can uncover with minimal effort, retiring the months-long embargoes such bugs once carried.

Maintainers merged the change to the project’s security policy on Thursday. Chaincode Labs developer Antoine Poinsot, who wrote the proposal, announced it the same day in a message to the Bitcoin Development Mailing List.

“We recently experienced an increase in the number of reports for security vulnerabilities that can be easily (re-)discovered,” Poinsot wrote. “This is largely due to LLMs drastically reducing the bar to find certain classes of issues or identify covert fixes.”

The revision makes discoverability, not just severity, a factor in how quickly the software running most Bitcoin nodes gets a public fix.

How the policy worked before

Under the previous framework, Bitcoin Core — the software that runs on most nodes in the Bitcoin network — graded each reported vulnerability by severity and timed its disclosure to match. Low-severity flaws were made public two weeks after the next major version shipped. Medium- and high-severity issues stayed under embargo until two weeks after the last affected release reached end of life, a span that could stretch to a year.

The long timelines were designed to give node operators, many of whom upgrade at a slow pace, time to move to patched software before details became public. In practice, the approach meant fixes went unreleased for older maintained versions and arrived only with the next major release.

Poinsot argued that this tradeoff fails for bugs that are easy to rediscover. “The embargo period achieves little but it delays the availability of a fixed release,” the policy reads.

What changes

During triage, Bitcoin Core can now flag a vulnerability as “easily discoverable,” a category the policy defines as issues that can be found “with minimal effort, such as through a simple LLM prompt.” The label is open to flaws found by other means as well.

For those issues, the project will backport a fix to every maintained major version, cut point releases as soon as possible and publish a security advisory with some details at the same time as the fixed software. Poinsot acknowledged that such fixes will have less testing time before they reach users. For operators on older maintained versions, that means patches now arrive as point releases rather than waiting for the next major version, with details published the moment the fix ships.

Vulnerabilities outside that category keep the existing severity-based schedule. Critical bugs — those that could enable coin theft at the protocol level, inflate the supply or cause a permanent chain split — remain outside the standard policy and will be handled case by case.

Developer Antoine Riard pushed for an option to ship a fix without an advisory and withhold details on a case-by-case basis. Poinsot declined, writing that alerting users without details “could create more risk unnecessarily” by prompting a rushed migration among users who would otherwise be unaffected.

A summer of AI-driven reports

The policy shift follows months of heightened pressure on Bitcoin’s open-source projects. In late July, a volunteer group of 16 developers known as the Bitcoin Red Team ran AI models across 390 bitcoin repositories in about a day and logged 4,962 findings, including 85 rated critical.

Within days, a BTCPay Server flaw the group had reported in private was exploited on live merchant servers, draining Lightning nodes. In August, Core Lightning developers told operators to upgrade or disconnect after AI-generated reports to the project proved accurate.

The Red Team effort followed a Coldcard hardware wallet exploit in which attackers drained 594 BTC in 25 minutes on July 30. Losses across four sweeps approached $114 million.

How often the “easily discoverable” label is applied — and how quickly fixes follow — will be visible in Bitcoin Core’s advisories and point releases going forward.

Source: Bitcoin Magazine | Written by Micah Zimmerman