Definition
Plain language
A bare-bones demonstration showing that an attack or idea actually works.
As stated in the literature
Minimal exploit or prototype code written to establish reachability and impact of a vulnerability, without the reliability engineering of a weaponized exploit.
Also called: proof of concept, PoC
Why it matters: It is the difference between claiming something might be exploitable and demonstrating that it is, which is usually what forces a fix to get prioritised.
For example, a researcher reporting a flaw might include ten lines of code that pop up a calculator on the target machine, just to show that arbitrary commands can be run.
Heard on the show
“ReasonMaxxer is the proof of concept.”Episode 026 — What RL Actually Does to Language Models, at the Token Level