To the Frontier and Back Again

[ Abstract ]

Two Windows bugs found with a frontier model, the first in just over an hour, and the human direction it took to get there. Then the same hunt replayed on open-weight local models to measure how much frontier capability survives.

At the frontier, the first legitimate 0-day finding appeared 1 hour, 16 minutes, 5 seconds after the initial request. Two Windows system-service 0-days anchor this talk: an information disclosure developed into an attacker-steerable privileged read, and a use-after-free developed through lifetime analysis, controlled reclaim, and heap grooming into write-what-where. I walk through the pattern behind both discoveries, from reconnaissance to validation, PoC, and closure. The speed is real, but it was not autonomous. The frontier model needed direction, correction, encouragement, and help with tools. It initially refused the PoC. That human work is part of the result. The talk exposes the process behind a successful bug hunt at the frontier, then comes back to test how large the gap to local models really is and what it takes to close it. I replay the hunt with the latest open-weight models, including Qwen, Gemma, GLM, and more. Same target. Same context. Same tools. Short tests isolate individual capabilities. Full runs ask whether a model can discover, validate, use the tools, reject false leads, and finish. If a local model fails, I add one measured piece of scaffolding and try again. How much frontier capability survives locally, and how much help does it need?