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Re:Launch HN: Metlo (YC S21) – Open-source software for secu... by freeqaz on Wednesday November 09, 2022 @02:48PM (#33536893)
I'll play devil's advocate for a second since I've got experience in this space.

My biggest issue with most fuzzing tools has always been the high rate of false positives. When I worked at Uber, we intentionally never exposed these tools to dev teams because it was too "noisy" to bother with. Most of the alerts were false positives 90%+ of the time and we eventually ignored them (even though were the security team).

How do you avoid that alert fatigue trap? Do you have a plan to ensure a high signal-to-noise ratio?

Re:Launch HN: Metlo (YC S21) – Open-source software for secu... by ashekhawat on Wednesday November 09, 2022 @03:16PM (#33537240)
Hey! Yes, false positives are are a problem that we’re hyper aware of, and a big challenge with most security tools. We have less of a problem with this than other tools for a few reasons :)

1) We're a bit different from a standard fuzzing tool, instead of generating traffic to send to an API we find vulnerabilities by analyzing real production/staging traffic. This gives our models a better understanding of how the API actually works. Although we might add a fuzzer at some point!

2) We split out very high signal vulns (https://demo.metlo.com/vulnerabilities) from vulns/attacks that we detect with our ML models that may have some false positives (https://demo.metlo.com/protection)... Different classifications give you a better way to triage any alerts.

3) We're putting a lot of effort into making our models really good, we're not comfortable with our tool having high false positive rates so when there's a model that is returning 90%+ false positives were aware of that and don't even add it :)

Thanks for the feedback and playing devils advocate!