Kimi K3 agents reportedly find 19 Redis zero-days, RCE in 27 min

A researcher named Chaofan Shou says a swarm of Kimi K3 agents surfaced 19 Redis zero-days in roughly 90 minutes and produced a working remote code execution exploit against Redis 8.8.0 in another 27, The Hacker News reported. The specific numbers are self-reported through Shou and the Bera Buddies group, which describes itself as "AI Agent Research," and while Redis has confirmed the underlying memory flaws it has not validated the zero-day count or the degree of agent autonomy.

What is not in dispute is the patch load. Redis shipped seven security releases on July 23 covering builds 6.2.22, 7.4.9, 8.6.4, and 8.8.0, with fixes rolling into 6.2.23, 7.2.15, 7.4.10, 8.2.8, 8.4.5, 8.6.5, and 8.8.1. The two disclosed exploit paths are a Streams shared-NACK double-free, in which a corrupt RDB object causes two consumers to reference the same pending-entry record, and an out-of-bounds write in the RedisBloom TDigest RDB loader that trusts an attacker-controlled capacity field. Both require an attacker to be able to run the RESTORE command, which is why the mitigation guidance is upgrade, revoke RESTORE from accounts that do not need it, and keep the port off untrusted networks.

If the autonomy claim holds up even partly, the interesting part is the shape of the workflow, not the tally. Finding memory-corruption bugs in a battle-tested C codebase inside 90 minutes and chaining one into an RCE inside 27 more is a loop that used to belong to well-funded offensive research teams. Cheap open-weight models running that loop against every popular open source dependency is a different threat model for maintainers and a different economics for defenders who now need to assume the same tooling is being pointed at their own code.

The claim rests on one researcher's write-up amplified on X, and Redis has not confirmed either the count or how much of the work the agents actually did on their own. Missing from the account are independent reproduction, a CVE-by-CVE severity breakdown, and evidence of exploitation in the wild. As of July 24 there was none. The upside sits with the defenders willing to point the same class of agent at their own dependency tree before someone less friendly does. That is the pitch behind Corma's $60M seed from Sequoia this week.