I gave Qwen 3.8 27B a reverse-engineering job and it finished in 30 minutes(xda-developers.com)
359 points by raybb 18 days ago | 148 comments
tl;dr: Running locally on a 128GB Nvidia GB10 workstation, Qwen 3.8 27B reverse-engineered a commercial app's license check in about 30 minutes using purely static analysis, recovering a deliberately obscured RSA public key and producing a working authentication bypass. Notably, it caught its own incorrect first reconstruction (a mismatched integrity hash) and self-corrected without prompting. The author argues this marks a real shift: capabilities once reserved for frontier cloud models now fit on a consumer GPU, with all the privacy and threat-model implications that entails.
HN Discussion:
  • Modern models' self-correction behavior on integrity mismatches is a real emerging pattern
  • Testable true/false tasks aren't the hardest real tasks, so the demo overstates difficulty
  • ~Local models are promising but crippled by built-in refusals that only hurt legitimate users
  • Future lies in frontier models orchestrating good-enough local models for daily tasks
  • Skepticism about the model's actual capabilities based on personal benchmarks and failed use cases