AI slop pollutes the CVE pipeline with fake vulns

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AI slop pollutes the CVE pipeline with fake vulns

With NIST still buried under its backlog, expect AI-generated bogus reports to continue

Brandon Vigliarolo

Brandon<br>Vigliarolo

GOVERNMENT AND IT NEWS REPORTER

Published<br>mon 3 Aug 2026 // 18:19 UTC

Now AI is making fake vulnerabilities and polluting the ecosystem. A batch of critical- and high-rated SQLite CVEs that appeared in the NVD with CISA-supplied enrichment last week turned out to be technically bogus, according to security researchers, and their path into widely used databases exposes weaknesses in the CVE pipeline.<br>Software supply chain security outfit JFrog reported last week that six supposed SQLite vulnerabilities published in a larger batch by a new, obscure GitHub repository were all complete garbage. Running the advisories through an AI checker suggested they were likely AI generated, JFrog said, and, upon testing, it found that none of the six SQLite reports, which carried CVSS scores ranging from 9.8 to 7.5, described a reproducible vulnerability.<br>One, an alleged use-after-free vulnerability in the open source database that Red Hat initially assigned a maximum 10.0 CVSS score to before lowering it, relied on a function that didn't exist in the affected SQLite version. Another UAF vulnerability with a 9.1 CVSS score cited source lines that weren't even related to the supposed flaw. When JFrog tested the accompanying proof-of-concept, it executed a valid query with no memory leaks or errors. The other four SQLite CVEs from the repo that JFrog tested were similarly fake.

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The other 49 CVEs in the questionable GitHub repo claimed to be security vulnerabilities in the open-source RAW image processing library libraw and Arduino audio decoding library ESP32-audioI2S. While JFrog didn't test those as extensively, it said all are just as fake as the rest, aside from one which “contained a real bug wrapped in unverified CVE metadata.”

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A message posted to Openwall’s OSS-Security mailing list on Friday indicated that MITRE had rejected the whole repo’s worth of vaporous vulnerabilities, but the whole thing should serve as an important lesson, poster and Oracle Solaris engineer Alan Coopersmith pointed out.<br>“MITRE and most other CNAs which assign CVEs for code they don't produce themselves operate on the honor system, and trust CVE requesters to have verified the information they provide,” Coopersmith noted in the OSS-Security post. “The CNA is often not in a position of being able to verify the report themselves.”<br>As JFrog points out, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which manages the US National Vulnerability Database (NVD), used to provide a reliable backstop by manually reviewing and enriching CVE records after they entered the database. That process slowed dramatically in 2024 after a surge in vulnerability submissions, coupled with operational challenges, left the agency with a growing backlog of records it was unable to process.<br>By late 2024, the backlog had grown to more than 17,000 unprocessed CVEs, despite NIST's plan to clear it by the end of fiscal year 2024 with contractor help. It continued to grow, reaching more than 27,000 by the end of 2025, according to a Department of Commerce Inspector General report published in May 2026.<br>To make matters worse, the DoC IG concluded that NIST had been wasting money allocated to fixing the backlog due to a “lack of strategic planning and decisive action” that has led to the stack of unresolved issues continuing to grow.<br>In other words, the pipeline has no mandatory checkpoint at which every claimed vulnerability must be independently reproduced.

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“Because no step in today's system actually requires a proof-of-concept or bug reproduction, a plausible-sounding fake advisory can slide right through the pipeline and end up in GitHub Security Advisories, downstream databases, and enterprise scanners,” JFrog said. “This incident demonstrates a systemic issue with automated vulnerability ingestion.”<br>What that means for security professionals, aside from having to deal with polluted vulnerability databases, is that bad advisories could waste time better spent chasing real issues. Because reputable databases can ingest unverified records, JFrog recommended several checks before defenders act on a newly published CVE.

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First off, if the vendor hasn’t corroborated the issue (SQLite maintainers don’t list the fake CVEs, for instance) it’s probably not legitimate. A lack of commit hash or pull request in the reference fields of a repo is also indicative of AI slop, as is suspicious metadata (i.e.,...