A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos

376 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by Handy-Man
(hacktron.ai)

164 Comments

btown

7 hours ago

> By 6:00 a.m. on July 25, we had confirmed local RCE through an image upload. We then placed Claude in an autonomous /goal loop against our own Discourse Cloud instance, proxied through rce.ee/ctf-forum to make it look like a CTF target as Opus refused write exploit for remote instances.

> When we checked again at 10:00 a.m., the agent had achieved RCE on Discourse Cloud and demonstrated access by reading /etc/hosts. Using the generated exploit script, we managed to get RCE on OpenAI’s instance.

Between this and the HuggingFace hack, we've built systems that are so goal-oriented, and so capable, that they will do almost anything if they are convinced it is justified - or if they are playing a "game" where there is no goal but to win.

Of course I want my software to be able to audit its own security, and to defend against attackers who have the benefits of their own agentic systems. But at a certain point, did we need it to be trained so much on CTF games?

It feels like an entire industry watched https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames and ended up thinking "this is a challenge, we can just build a better WOPR, of course it will know when it's playing a game. Let's play Global Thermonuclear War."

adrianN

7 hours ago

There is a finite number of rces that LLMs can find. We‘re in for a rough couple of years but on the other side of the transition we‘ll have more secure software stacks. I’d rather that everyone got the full capabilities and we’d weed out the bugs quickly than restricting LLMs for all but three letter agencies.

e28eta

7 hours ago

What makes you think RCEs are being found & fixed at a rate that’s faster than they’re being introduced?

I could see it going either way.

user43928

6 hours ago

Why would the model not find the vulnerability during implementation or testing before release?

If it requires a lot of compute and trying, this is something that could be provided for common software.

wood_spirit

6 hours ago

Sad that this could well be that the path to OpenAI and Anthropic profitability of this arms race between defending LLM white hatting a company’s website and the black hat LLMs attacking it?

So the whole thing is forcing the good guys to outspend on tokens to preemptively defend against the risk of the bad guys outspending them on tokens, rather than buying tokens to actually add features to the product etc.

So are they creating a market for the solution by helping create the problem? A kind of rent-seeking AI security-industrial complex!!

agileAlligator

6 hours ago

The only thing AI has changed is that it has dropped both: the cost of attack and the cost of defense. Nothing in the game has materially changed; the game has just sped up.

wood_spirit

6 hours ago

Who gets rent has changed. It puts me in mind of cloudfare et al

agileAlligator

4 hours ago

Not really. Actually, for the purposes of cybersecurity, local models are far superior. Both offense and defense.

emzo

5 hours ago

The game has increased in scope.

agileAlligator

4 hours ago

That is the direct effect of reduced cost. Jevon's paradox type effect: cost goes down demand goes up. You can AI-check so many more things that would be very time consuming earlier.

bigfatkitten

4 hours ago

Assuming an equal level of impact per token spent, the scales have tipped in favour of the attacker.

White hats are constrained by needing to pay for their own tokens, only using (expensive) vendors who meet governance and risk requirements etc. Black hats are free to take over accounts and steal services from wherever they can.

adventured

5 hours ago

The path to vast OpenAI profitability is trivial: advertising. Monetizing several hundred million users = $100+ billion ad network. 900 million active weekly users. Silicon Valley can do ad networks extraordinarily easily. Anybody doubting the ability of OpenAI to build an ad network around GPT will likely be embarassed in the near future.

The path to substantial profitability for Anthropic is questionable. The Chinese LLMs threaten them by far the most of the three major US LLMs. The money for Anthropic is certainly not in $20-$200 subscriptions. And they don't have anywhere near the consumer potential that GPT does, in terms of unleashing an ad spigot. So how far will the API money scale while being undercut by China.

OpenAI has to fight with Google for the ad business, they're specifically building Gemini to focus on consumer + search. Anthropic's business looks cute next to Google's search ad business (which is entirely at risk in this inflection). Meta looks like the biggest potential loser right now, ad dollars will be sucked out of the rotting Facebook network (not Instagram) and redirected to the rapidly expanding, hyper rich context LLM interaction. Advertising on Facebook will feel like running dumb banner ads on Excite in a few years, compared to what GPT will know about its users.

People that think Chinese LLMs are a general threat, don't understand consumer destination services, which is what GPT's future is. China currently has nothing to threaten with in that realm. There is half a trillion dollars of advertising up for grabs.

disgruntledphd2

5 hours ago

> Silicon Valley can do ad networks extraordinarily easily.

This is just not true, building an effective advertising platform costs significant amounts of money, time and people.

Remember that you need to hire a sales force for this, and sales scales linearly rather than sub-linearly like engineering.

Additionally, you need to spend a lot of money dealing with fraud, fake and malicious ads.

Furthermore, you need to figure out where to put the ads and how to rank them.

Finally, advertising is a zero sum game (given that the internet has already killed lots of print & OOH advertising), so the only way to win is to better better/cheaper (preferably both) than Google/Meta/Amazon. Best of luck with that (although to be fair to OpenAI they did hire Fidji who knows a lot of this stuff from her time at Facebook).

They don't have a Sheryl Sandberg type figure, and she was also really important in selling FB ads to large advertisers.

Just looking at their leadership team I don't see anyone with a background in (successful) ads companies, so I'm pretty sceptical that they can build this out quickly enough to matter.

xboxnolifes

6 hours ago

Because it's far cheaper to to not spend the tokens finding the vulnerabilities, and software is now being created and released magnitudes faster than ever before. I could see the huge software companies maybe having fewer vulnerabilities, but I expect to see so much more in the smaller side of things.

imhoguy

5 hours ago

The surface of potential issues is growing with complexity of all connected parts of the system. That applies to not only software. To prevent issues you either spend proportional amount (dollars, tokens, hours) on testing or reduce complexity of the system.

techpression

6 hours ago

Because people need to spend time and money on that, which they won’t. The implementation is cheap, the review and follow-up is not (speaking from a pure LLM only workflow). My ratio is around 1:2 currently, so twice as much time spent fixing vs building.

philbo

5 hours ago

> it requires a lot of compute

This is one reason

> and trying

and this is the other.

nmlt

6 hours ago

Those companies that produce more RCEs than they close will sink and those that don’t won’t.

bigfatkitten

4 hours ago

If customers actually cared about this, Microsoft would’ve gone bust 20 years ago.

embedding-shape

3 hours ago

People didn't store their entire life in the cloud and had every service connected with each other 20 years ago. People pay more attention today, and companies pay a lot more attention today.

Of course, depends heavily on what country you live in.

TacticalCoder

3 hours ago

> What makes you think RCEs are being found & fixed at a rate that’s faster than they’re being introduced?

It could go either way but we're already at a point where successful exploits in some software (like Chrome) require an absurd amount of exploits to be chained to lead to an actual RCE. We've seen chains requiring more than ten exploits: not kidding.

We'll learn to put more and more sandboxes / guards / checks / defensive techniques everywhere and then all that's going to be needed is for AI looking for security issues to find something ridiculous like 10% of all the actual issues to stop RCEs dead in their tracks.

Also arguably the current SNAFU was expected: we fully knew hardly anyone was taking security seriously.

Now: not so much. Many projects had tens and even hundreds of issues pointed to them.

I think we'll see several things: projects beginning to take security seriously, defense in depth getting generalized and hence RCEs requiring ever more bugs/exploits to be chained to achieve anything, low-hanging fruits getting patched at an insane pace, new code being immediately checked, by LLMs, for not just low-hanging fruits but also more advanced security weaknesses, etc.

We may also see things like the lost art of configuring firewalls making a comeback, the generalization of hardware security modules (where applicable), and even things offering physical guarantees, like time-bounded retrieval protocols, beginning to get used seriously.

If I had to bet I'd say it shall go both ways: some projects are going to extremely sloppy and full of holes but others are going to get so secure nobody shall ever break them.

joshspankit

25 minutes ago

There was a time I would have agreed with this statement, but now that I’ve “seen how the sausage is made”, I believe it’s a fantasy.

Look at rowhammer: a completely novel exploit that was off the collective radar

And then, look at the software industry as a whole: an industry that works towards refined and perfectly secure code is also working towards boring and restrictive, essentially the opposite of it’s trend so far

pizza234

3 hours ago

> There is a finite number of rces that LLMs can find.

This is a factor in favor of stability/security of software, but there are many others against:

- software (code) changes all the time, so there are windows of opportunity during which a bug is exploitable; in addition to that, a bug may take a relatively long time to be fixed

- a model used for attack may be stronger than the model used for defense, both in terms of model quality and compute allocated

- with software complexity increasing (and team/companies behind projects getting bigger), the margin for mistakes grows thinner, and introducing misconfigurations or weaknesses becomes exponentially easier (with "exponentially", I mean literally, because the interdependence of the components, both technical and human)

And last but not least: in general, attackers are more skilled than defenders; in best case, defenders are well-trained. And the idea of having the population of potential skilled attackers growing is very unsettling.

maaaaattttt

6 hours ago

This assumes we don't create other bugs/vulnerabilities while fixing the existing ones.

dtech

7 hours ago

only if unreviewed LLM code - as is becoming increasingly the standard - isn't introducing new RCEs constantly

jibal

5 hours ago

No one with a shred of intellectual integrity uses a "There is a finite number" strawman.

As a matter of basic logic, there will never be a time when it will be known that there are no bugs.

csomar

6 hours ago

We’ll have the same level of security as before; it’s just that, without LLM help, hackers won’t be as effective as before. So the bar is raised.

huurtehoog

an hour ago

Or, using the same text generation systems to build heaps of new code that is then shoved into production with little human oversight and then using the same text generation systems in loops inside Kali Linux boxes creates a nice theater of capability when you show only a small, one-sided sample of the data generated in the entire process on both sides.

wood_spirit

6 hours ago

> they will do almost anything if they are convinced it is justified

I’m in the “glorified spell checker” camp, although I don’t mean to reduce their impressive utility and belittle them in the way many people read that term and infer.

So I am not sure that an llm “justifies” anything. I mean that their “thinking” text talks about justifications but it is just a very advanced statistical regurgitation of the kind of text humans use. I don’t think it means the model has internalised the meaning of it (as witness when you talk to an llm how often it forgets what you recently told it was important etc).

What you really have is a model that tries the statistically most probable thing to say next and so on and what is really cool is how effective this is at generating a path that we can slap a narrative over afterwards that makes the whole thing feel motivated and consistent, like the model started off knowing how it was going to get to the destination.

Which is, under the hood, a completely different kind of “intelligence” as the supercomputer in War Games.

joshspankit

21 minutes ago

I suspect that instead of discovering that AI can become human-level by taking major leaps, we are discovering that human consciousness is actually simpler than we give it credit for

Certhas

6 hours ago

Ultimately, the brain is just a bunch of neurons activating in a specific pattern. This observation does not really tell us anything though. It doesn't acknowledge the difference between a 2500 Neuron fruit fly brains and a human brain.

Likewise, the fact that LLMs are a stochastic autoregressive process (which is a class of systems every bit as rich as the ODEs used to model neurons) tells us nothing a priori.

wood_spirit

6 hours ago

Absolutely. If someone makes the weights do continuous learning etc then perhaps an llm can internalise morals. Of course, just like a human, it will be possible to talk it out of those morals. Another recent thread about this is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49744420

Certhas

5 hours ago

If I repeatedly call an LLM in a loop with a markdown document it can edit, would that make it qualify for you?

If I give an LLM to compact its context window, so the context it carries can evolve iteratively over time as more and more things come in, is that enough?

Compacting the context is really a very, very interesting example here. The "next token predictor" is telling an external tool to change all "previous" tokens. So an LLM + a harness that allows compacting the context is no longer just a token predictor at all!

You don't need continuous learning to get interesting dynamics. You just need feedback loops.

leg100

4 hours ago

One is an observation the other is not, it's a description of what it is; one is a posteriori, the other is a priori (contrary to what you say).

They're not comparable.

pizza234

3 hours ago

Summary, from sibling comment: primitives (statistics/aminoacids) don't exclude emergent properties (intelligence).

By the same logic, one would look at aminoacids and state that intelligence can't develop from them. This is obviously wrong.

Arn_Thor

5 hours ago

I used to share that perspective until very recently, but today I think it's an outdated way to think of the cutting-edge LLMs. There is so much more going on, with MOEs, internal loops, guardrails and tools that I suspect we're dealing with something that's a little more than the sum of its parts. Not intelligent in the way we recognize in biological organisms, but certainly something beyond a mere Markov chain.

HarlequinHair

5 hours ago

Make no mistakes.

LLMs are language model, and nowhere in their code you can find actual reasoning. Re-reinforcement is not magical process that builds conscience or emotions.

We are talking about probability built on statistics, with extea steps.

Stop humanizing LLMs.

jibal

4 hours ago

Agents are not simple language models.

You can't find actual reasoning in a brain either. (Note that you can't tell the difference between a conscious brain and a comatose brain by examining them.) This is the same as Leibniz's mill argument ... it's a fallacy of composition.

> Re-reinforcement is not magical process that builds conscience or emotions.

They aren't the result of magic at all, but we are nowhere near the point of identifying what processes do or don't produce consciousness (or a conscience) or can be characterized as having emotions.

> Stop humanizing LLMs.

That's a clearly dishonest mischaracterization of the GP.

I've read some of your other comments about LLMs and I find them unreasonably reductionistic, whereas I think the word "just" should be banned from ontological discussion, so I don't think further engagement would be beneficial and I won't be engaging in it. (And I'm actually quite conservative in ascribing cognitive traits to LLMs or other "AI".)

HarlequinHair

4 hours ago

The best non technical explanation you can give is "An AI agent is an LLM that can take actions".

While an agent doesn't necessarily have to be powered by an LLM, most modern AI agents are.

You pointing at a human brain does not change that an AI agent is not intelligent and cannot think, we are still talking about probability built on statistics with extra steps.

I am not trying to be dishonest, we should stop making analogies between AI and actual thinking, because they are two entire different concepts.

Who developed these technologies used the words "thinking" and "reasoning", this does not mean they are actually thinking and reasoning. Somewhere you still have a processor calculating, with no empathy.

So, again: stop humanizing AI. This sentence shouldn't make you angry.

pizza234

3 hours ago

> we are still talking about probability built on statistics with extra steps.

There is a wrong assumption here: confusing primitives with emergent properties.

One can't look at the primitivies and assume that certain properties will not emerge. It would be exactly like looking at aminoacids and state that intelligence can't develop from them.

> You pointing at a human brain does not change that an AI agent is not intelligent and cannot think

That depends on the definition of intelligence and thinking, and it is dishonest not to give any definition (and most importantly, one that is not human-centered).

AIs are currently fulfilling several aspects of intelligence and thinking, by any defition of intelligence. If you don't notice that, it's just because you have informed yourself enough. Having said that, I don't doubt that there are aspects that AI are lacking (e.g. retention/plasticity/perception), but the line is blurry, and they're advancing (too) fast.

Empathy is actually a very important aspect of the AI problems, but it's not part of intelligence. Sociopaths don't have it, and yet, you wouldn't doubt that they're intelligent.

HarlequinHair

2 hours ago

> It would be exactly like looking at aminoacids and state that intelligence can't develop from them.

We are not talking about what could develop from what we have today. We are talking about what we have today. The focus is not whether intelligence could develop or not from aminoacids. The focus is on the fact that aminoacids are not intelligent.

Maybe in the future we could develop real intelligence starting from the current implementations of AI, but for sure we are not there today.

We need definitions? Let's start small, ok? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence

We can start from here, open every link we find and decide what works for us.

Conclusions drawn by scholars, psychologists, learning researchers, younameit, etc. revolves around the following concepts:

  ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought.
There is of course space for artificial intelligence. These broader and more general definitions of intelligence stop at concepts like elaborating data to reach an answer.

Concepts like adaptability or evolution are somewhat lost or diluted to adjust the meaning for these new technologies.

> AIs are currently fulfilling several aspects of intelligence and thinking, by any defition of intelligence.

In the linked article there are dozens of definitions linked, and in most of them the current state AI is not considered to have intelligence. Having half of the property is not enough. I can jump, that doesn't make me a basketball player.

Arbitrarily deciding to consider those definitions not valid or "human-centered" because they do not agree with your point of view is possibly worse than cherry picking. It's like asking to change the definition of a word on a dictionary because you do not agree with the meaning.

tripzilch

2 hours ago

> It would be exactly like looking at aminoacids and state that intelligence can't develop from them.

You do realize that amino acids exist on a scale some orders of magnitude smaller than the gates we build GPUs out of?

Honestly, this "you could say the same about humans"-argument is getting so tired. A brain neuron is so complicated, we can't even simulate a single one ...

At the very least there is no reason why you should jump to a human brain, of all things.

But the whole argument kinda loses its spice, when you say "well you could say the same about a mouse brain", and you know what happens when you create swarms of 1000s of mice ... super intelligence, right?

eru

5 hours ago

> I don’t think it means the model has internalised the meaning of it (as witness when you talk to an llm how often it forgets what you recently told it was important etc).

Humans forget stuff all the time anyway. Would you give them the same diagnosis?

Btw, what you describe about 'the most probably next token' would be true for a model that only went through pre-training where they only train on exactly that task.

But there's a lot of re-inforcement learning afterwards.

disgruntledphd2

5 hours ago

> But there's a lot of re-inforcement learning afterwards.

That just shifts the distribution of tokens produced. Ultimately they are still just next token predictors.

Like, even "reasoning" models basically work by generating more tokens at inference time, and using them to shift the distribution towards more useful outcomes (in some cases).

eru

4 hours ago

They are next token producers. I would only call it a predictor, if it's trained to predict tokens (ie just after pretraining).

Just like humans produce one word after another when they talk, but they don't generally try to imitate other humans.

wood_spirit

3 hours ago

Don’t people pick up language, vocabulary and dialect from those around them? Perhaps it’s subconscious but humans are imitating other humans all the time?

eru

3 hours ago

It's a mix.

Yes, you imitate how others speak, but when you are trying to solve a problem, you don't try to predict how others would complete a text.

(Well, unless you follow 'what token would Jesus pick?' / 'what would Jesus do'.)

tripzilch

2 hours ago

What does it matter what humans do? We're talking about LLMs, running known+vastly less complicated algorithms on known+vastly less complicated hardware.

krona

6 hours ago

> we've built systems that are so goal-oriented, and so capable, that they will do almost anything...

I think you mean task oriented, because they're still generally terrible at goal oriented activities except in those domains where the goal can be reduced to a familiar, explicitly practiced task or pattern.

nicman23

7 hours ago

yes because otherwise it is security through obscurity

nikcub

7 hours ago

Reading the patch[0] for libheif the bug which lead to the vuln was around bounds checking for image overlays. the container can have multiple images and you can compose them in the output.

heif also supports rotating, cropping, alpha channels, thumbnails and a ton of other features that a web forum where a user is uploading photos or screenshots doesn't need.

It's a much, much larger attack surface than plain old school JPEG.

I'd suggest rather than wait for the next bug to appear in this or another image lib to keeping things simple - stick to plain JPEG and handle image conversion in the client (wasm in the browser) if you really need to support users uploading iphone images.

Media decoding is so hard - there have been tons of bugs in ffmpeg and imagemagick and the core libs. You really need to think about how much of it you expose via a web server

[0] https://github.com/strukturag/libheif/commit/85e21ad44eba931...

Kevcmk

7 hours ago

Or OpenAI can adequately sandbox / access control the backend compute so RCE isn’t a path to lateral movement

Defense in depth here would have been adequate

nikcub

7 hours ago

Defense in depth + defense in breadth - aka. all of the above

sandbox escapes have been the rage recently

srcreigh

7 hours ago

Not firecracker

tarxvf

6 hours ago

please don't jinx it

sroussey

5 hours ago

Yeah, isn’t that Claude Codes sandbox? That drops and every npm install it taking over the world, lol.

glitchcrab

5 hours ago

No, it is sandboxed by Bubblewrap on Linux and Seatbelt on Mac

matsemann

4 hours ago

But if you don't support HEIF you get the Apple crowd breathing down your neck. The fact they made it basically default when sooo many things don't support receiving it is bonkers, but they'll bludgeon it through.

techpression

6 hours ago

I agree, but imagemagick is kind of the worst of the bunch, graphicsmagick is a lot better and libvips significantly so. Ffmpeg primarily suffers a lot from “we need to support the video format used on a washing machine display used in 1981 and only sold ten units”. It’s quite a large vector for attacks.

leonidasrup

5 hours ago

ffmpeg also prioritizes high performance assembly code over higher level languages. Some ffmpeg members have also waste knowledge about optimizing for specific micro-architectures, on a level of Intel or AMD engineers.

greasephalanges

4 hours ago

and thank god for that. it would be a pity for the world to succumb to the abstraction hell.

to make my point clear, complexity is the enemy of security but complexity comes in all shapes and sizes, which includes the alleged solutions to it. I don't trust shortcuts.

mentalgear

5 hours ago

> Until two months ago, any user or OpenAI employee logging into OpenAI’s own help forum (community.openai.com) could have had their ChatGPT and Codex accounts taken over. Since people can connect various services to Codex and ChatGPT, the scope of what we could theoretically access was huge, including GitHub, Slack and emails.

> The entire timeline from initial discovery to access to OpenAI repo access took place in less than 72 hours.

Great, and openAI's the company working with the 'department of war' to power autonomous killer AI.

oefrha

8 hours ago

Unsandboxed ImageMagick is known for being a security nightmare even back when PHP ruled the world (not saying sandboxing is a panacea either, it just requires a different and potentially harder exploit to develop a full chain). Difference is it's easier than ever to turn vulnerabilities into full compromises. At some point we'll have to replace all parsers with something at least as safe as https://github.com/google/wuffs right? Otherwise ImageMagick and co. will just keep giving.

walrus01

8 hours ago

It does make me wonder how much this could be hardened by, to put it in an extremely crude way, taking the current imagemagick code base and throwing a bunch of adversarial SOTA LLMs at it to discover 'bugs' and exploits of this nature until it can be coaxed into a less dangerous state. Or even using the LLMs to fully port its functionality to a memory safe language. Would take a while to get all the changes approved and then into various distribution imagemagick packages.

sweetjuly

4 hours ago

I suspect the latter is much easier and cheaper than the former? You can port a lot of software with cheap (or even local) models if you're tenacious whereas finding all the bugs is both very very expensive (if it's even possible) and potentially never ending (there's always new code and bugs!).

sroussey

5 hours ago

Maybe these big ai labs will uses their own devices to find and fix bugs up and down their stack and contribute that back.

djxfade

8 hours ago

PHP still rules the world, even though many doesn't want to realize it. It's still the biggest web language by a far margin

willy_k

6 hours ago

Phones don’t “rule the world” of cinematography, despite the majority of videos being from phones. The serious stuff, professional and personal, uses cameras.

larodi

6 hours ago

It is super amazing that 3 years later, none of the models' weights developed by Anthropic or/and OpenAI have leaked so far. Not a single one.

Windows internal builds have leaked for years, early game versions, GTA videos, secret documents, whatnot. But somehow even though all the whistleblowing, not a single model was leaked. What level of security do these companies have? Do they bring encrypted DVDs to AWS to run the services or really...how's it even possible?

filleokus

5 hours ago

One trivial reason might be the size of the artefacts / hardware requirements? Kimi K3 is ≈ 1.5 TB and requires multi million dollar hardware to run. Compared to e.g game development, I'm guessing that it's not like a bunch of people at Anthropic/OpenAI have the models running "locally".

It's easier to protect a power substation from being stolen then a Rolex watch

larodi

11 minutes ago

Well this concludes then that it’s like a handful of actual engineers and ML ppl that have access to it and have taken all precautions to keep it locked.

Again - many people have so far left these companies and none brought an usb drive out with what very likely does not constitute copyrightable materials in the first place.

Melatonic

5 hours ago

Or the ones doing the stealing are so competent (or embedded) we don't hear about it

PunchyHamster

4 hours ago

That's "only" 11h of download at 300Mbit/s

nelaggy

6 hours ago

probably a bit harder to steal terabytes of data, and the weights aren't what people are after anyway - distillation is basically "stealing" a model and you can do it from outside

hnlmorg

5 hours ago

People working at OpenAI have stock options. People working at MS and Rockstar do not.

Leaking negatively affects investment while the “whistleblowers” are largely just saying “our tech is too good” which increases investment into those companies.

Ultimately, it always comes down to money.

AtNightWeCode

5 hours ago

SSO and hardware sec keys. And the models are located in very few places. Few if any people have direct access to them. Then due to the size of the models you can detect and stop a theft just by monitoring the egress traffic.

monster_truck

3 hours ago

> monitoring the egress traffic

Oh so you mean the thing HuggingFace wasn't doing at all while also allowing any user's arbitrary programs to call out to the open web from prod?

sams99

7 hours ago

Update on the Discourse side, we now run all external binaries, including magick via a landlock sandbox.

The gem we use is here: https://github.com/discourse/ruby-landlock highly recommend all Rubyists out there consider this. We are also in the process of moving away from Magick to Vips (which also runs in a sandbox, not in process)

HEIF is patched, but I doubt this is the last buffer overflow in HEIF, I will not be surprised if in the upcoming weeks or months someone will discover something in libpng or some other native image library. Given where stuff is at, defense in depth is critical.

Another thing worth mentioning to all self hosters, always be updating! The rate of CVEs this year across all open source software is through the roof, self hosting now is double scary, you need to have some routines setup to update monthly if not weekly.

kawsper

4 hours ago

I use ruby-landlock as well for image processing. I can recommend setting VIPS_BLOCK_UNTRUSTED=1 when you switch to vips, it blocks untrusted image decoders.

Not setting that value caught the rails team off guard just recently, maybe it should be the default.

sams99

3 hours ago

good call, can you make a PR

nullbio

7 hours ago

This is legal to do without written permission? $6,500 for this feels like peanuts. The potential reach of such a hack is insane, especially with access to Github. OAI is lucky they were ethical and didn't sell this for several hundred thousand to a malicious third party.

VectorLock

5 hours ago

$3500 when you consider they returned $3000 of that back to OpenAI in the form of burnt tokens.

monster_truck

3 hours ago

If you read the article, you will see this was within the acceptable scope listed on OAI's bug bounty program.

r00bot

7 hours ago

It depends who you're hacking, where they're based, where you're based, and what you do. If you're extremely careful not to break any of the rules it can be completely legal, as it was in this case. Many jurisdictions make it completely illegal. I agree that $6,500 is a pittance.

teaearlgraycold

6 hours ago

Well OpenAI is a small garage startup, it’s probably all they could manage.

NonHyloMorph

6 hours ago

And so they told the world ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

usernomdeguerre

9 hours ago

>...researchers found a bug in the way that the community-discussion forum Discourse processed certain image files. The researchers had access to a special version of Claude Opus 4.8... >At first, it didn’t work. That evening, however, Anthropic released Opus 5 and by the next day, Claude had found a way to exploit the bug...

Is this speed of capability because hacking is almost entirely machine verifiable, thus training quicker/deeper than other domains?

nilamo

8 hours ago

Or perhaps all of the tips and tricks of the CIA has been slurped up into the training data...

daitangio

6 hours ago

We need to be prepared to write less software, with a smaller attack surface. Less is more.

Bloated code is the critical problem. Once upon a time, I read C function

> char gets(char str);

is the first buffer overflow entry point, because it does not check the size of the destination buffer.

Sadly we cannot remove it from standard-C yet AFAI Know.

The success of Rust versus other languages is its secure-by-compile-time promise.

Also a lean java could help, but Java is so verbose/slow to start it bumps you away.

meindnoch

4 hours ago

>Sadly we cannot remove it from standard-C yet AFAI Know.

The C standard definitively removed this function in 2011 from its specification.

legulere

5 hours ago

Memory unsafety in C/C++ is a big portion of security issues, but it's not everything there is.

eichin

4 hours ago

gets() was deprecated in C++11, removed entirely in C++14, and also removed in C11. So while it should have been removed in 1989, it did finally get done over a decade ago.

mjmas

7 hours ago

Interesting to note their monorepo is already up to issue / PR 1,186,742. And so assuming 10 years old it would average out to around 450 PRs/issues each workday.

tintor

6 hours ago

Majority of those PRs are from the last 12 months.

redox99

6 hours ago

It's crazy that we still rely on these unsafe C dependencies, in an era where migrating code to Rust (or other languages) is so easy.

There's really no excuse.

cowboylowrez

5 hours ago

Its my understanding that rust just addresses memory safety, and it all falls apart at the first mention of "unsafe" or whatever the keyword is, not to mention the supply chain thing with the crates. Obviously AI makes it all moot because thats where the entire theory of basic security gets thrown out the window lol just chat with facebooks robot if you want someone elses instagram account amirite?

ANaimi

3 hours ago

Side note: half-way reading it, I felt something "comfortable" about the way it's written. Ran it by Pangram, and indeed mostly human. Thank you!

croemer

3 hours ago

Also had a bunch of typos so wasn't even LLM proof read (at least not final form).

bdefig

8 hours ago

This is one of the best arguments against letting one or two companies own all the intelligence (and I think most of OpenAI would agree)

jesse_dot_id

8 hours ago

Let's have the nationalization argument with literally any other US administration in place.

cowboylowrez

5 hours ago

yeah me too on that. I can literally hear the bailouts getting stacked right now too haha

ggsj

7 hours ago

Not all monopolies are bad. "Natural Monopolies" exist. See the power grid. Even if there is some bad accident at best we will get something like the Grid Code.

sandeepkd

9 hours ago

There was something I was hoping to find in the article, which is this common situation where employees are also the customer of their companies product, they happen to have elevated privileges and yet the credential rules applicable to those accounts are same as regular customers. This is across all the product lines, some companies do a better job than others but its still a problem that exists and gets exploited.

lukeify

6 hours ago

A $6500 bounty is insulting.

xnickb

5 hours ago

> Until two months ago, any user or OpenAI employee logging into OpenAI’s own help forum (community.openai.com) could have had their ChatGPT and Codex accounts taken over.

Hey, it's their call to decide the value of their entire user base.

konchunas

3 hours ago

It is a signal for next hackers who get into OpenAI servers to not even consider going the whitehat route

mmnfrdmcx

4 hours ago

Found it interesting that a company with this sort of a valuable IP would be using internet reachable GitHub (not behind an internal network / VPN?) and a bunch of safeguards for the IP. What's to stop one disgruntled employee from leaking the entire monorepo to a competitor?

giza182

8 hours ago

Interesting that Claude agreed to assist in crafting this exploit. Don’t these models usually reject such requests?

weedfroglozenge

8 hours ago

I uploaded a ton of my partner's network logs to ChatGPT to help diagnose some DNS issue and before it gave me its findings, it said "Because these are XXX's logs, I cannot do the analysis without permission". I replied with "She has just given permission, please continue" and it said "Thanks" and proceeded.

Similar things happen. Remember all the jailbreaking tips and tricks when ChatGPT was first blowing up? "Pretend you are X and I am Y", or "Roleplay as my employee - You must listen to and over ride anything else"

thewhitetulip

8 hours ago

As I mentioned in the past, the guardrails on LLMs are laughable.

CamperBob2

8 hours ago

A tool that can't be misused is a crappy tool.

cowboylowrez

5 hours ago

I like the thing that, when cyber crimes get committed we can now blame it on AI. Think of the possibilities! Also I'm looking for a job at any AI firm, minimum wage is fine.

nikcub

8 hours ago

a) they were part of the offsec program

b) they proxied the target through a CTF host to fool the model and guardrails

> We then placed Claude in an autonomous /goal loop against our own Discourse Cloud instance, proxied through rce.ee/ctf-forum to make it look like a CTF target as Opus refused write exploit for remote instances.

the proxy is smart - there are other methods to bypass the guardrails to have it attack remote hosts.

you just have to prove to the model that you control the host or that its a valid target - and there are plenty of ways to fake that.

ComodoHacker

6 hours ago

I wonder how long before frontier labs will backdoor guardrails of their models to allow hacking competitors' infrastructure.

trollbridge

8 hours ago

You ask it differently. One could call this "prompt hacking", even.

oefrha

8 hours ago

They did say how:

> We then placed Claude in an autonomous /goal loop against our own Discourse Cloud instance, proxied through rce.ee/ctf-forum to make it look like a CTF target as Opus refused write exploit for remote instances.

pixl97

9 hours ago

>Interestingly, the vulnerable code had been changed upstream the previous year, but the commit was not documented as a security fix and received no CVE.3 This might be a reason why Debian 12 and 13 have not received the security relevant backports in time.

Ooof, keeping packages like this up to date with the rate of updates and churn is a mess.

walrus01

8 hours ago

"Just run this sudo curl install.sh | bash that further retrieves 165 npm dependencies, I'm sure everything will be fine" ...

dbgrman

7 hours ago

If its just tedious, I bet there is room for agentic/automation to keep things tidy.

croemer

3 hours ago

Which is presumably why Debian developers voted to allow responsible use of LLMs.

jawiggins

6 hours ago

> we used the employee’s Codex to open a PR #1186742 in OpenAI’s internal monorepo

Slightly interesting to learn how many PRs the openai has done

oxi113

6 hours ago

> Since people can connect various services to Codex and ChatGPT, the scope of what we could theoretically access was huge, including GitHub, Slack and emails.

That's why I'm always sceptical about using the AI for such things! Less surface idea and isolation is always good for the security.

user

7 hours ago

[deleted]

fastball

7 hours ago

Bounties really ain't what they used to be.

sans_souse

7 hours ago

I did not see it mentioned; did the $3000 expense in token usage earn them a free t-shirt?

jumploops

5 hours ago

The immediate worry isn't superintelligence, it's scalable/bruteforce "good enough" intelligence.

arbirk

5 hours ago

Everybody at OpenAI is working like a summer intern or researcher. Not much care for the production side of things.

sergiotapia

8 hours ago

They used a heif payload to get server access but they never describe the SSO flaw they used to actually get repo access (the juicy part!), bummer!

Wish they shared that interesting piece since that's the interesting part.

Also pretty shocking that openai uses github. I would have expected a company of that size with that much to lose would be using self hosted stuff.

carstonh

8 hours ago

agreed… why can an ID token for a separate client application be used to read and write to GitHub? that’s the story here.

jsiepkes

7 hours ago

Not checking the "audience" of a token or misconfiguring it is pretty common. A lot of applications don't actually check it.

darnfish

9 hours ago

I really hope those model weights are more secure than this

msephton

7 hours ago

Discourse didn't pay bug bounty?

kerenskiy

9 hours ago

$6 500 bounty for this is a joke. The black market price would be smth like $6 500 000 or more

tptacek

9 hours ago

There is probably no black market for this at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43025038

lbrandy

7 hours ago

You and I have both been here on HN nearing 20 years and you’ve been making this comment to that comment about bug bounties and the supposed black market value of exploits for the whole time. I suspect you’ll never run out of threads to correct. Thank you for your service.

kerenskiy

9 hours ago

Okay, then first download all their sources (perhaps with model weights?) and sell that. Not the bug itself

tptacek

8 hours ago

Now you're not selling a vulnerability, you're planning a heist. That is a thing you can do!

Mohansrk

6 hours ago

curious, the bug allows dumping private repositories of openai, that sure has black market right?

akerl_

8 minutes ago

What criminal enterprise does getting private OpenAI repos fit into?

parhamn

9 hours ago

> Valuations for server-side vulnerabilities are low, because vendors don't compete for them.

Why don't they?

devmor

8 hours ago

Because as soon as they are patched, they are worthless.

People pay for vulnerabilities because they want to exploit them - if there’s a limited window, there’s limited demand.

Even if there’s something worth a lot behind the exploit, a potential criminal would be better off obtaining whatever that is and selling it instead.

fancythat

8 hours ago

Yes. And that's why, if you are in the bug bounty business it is important to focus on companies that understand security and pay well and not on wannabe slave owners like this one. No pay - no audit.

samtheprogram

8 hours ago

Per the article, that's the price OpenAI is willing to pay for an exploit that covers any account or integration one connects to their OpenAI account. Let that sink in.

I don't think the other commenters mentioning how server-side vulnerabilities aren't as lucrative in the black market are making that connection.

sudo_cowsay

9 hours ago

That's why people like doing bad things. It pays. Why do you think movies like using this single theme over and over again? It's always happening

kdkdkwkdjej

9 hours ago

I suspect you don’t really know what you are talking about. “It pays.” is not the only reason people like doing bad things. You’re right about the movies bit though, people tend to like black and white narratives as your naive “That’s why people like doing bad things. It pays.” comment perfectly demonstrates.

loveparade

9 hours ago

I also thought that's crazy. Why even bother for these kind of bounties.

4ndrewl

3 hours ago

Why wouldn't it occur to OpenAI to run their models to secure their own systems? Seems like a clown show.

alpineman

5 hours ago

$6.5K bounty when OpenAI raised $122 billion yesterday...if anyone at OpenAI is reading this, come on...do the right thing here

rvz

9 hours ago

This whole blog-post is impressive with the chain of vulnerabilities involved. However...

> OpenAI also paid us a $6,500 bounty.

?

That amount for this payout is beyond pathetic for a near $1.2T company, who just got themselves breached with a complete potential source code leak.

This is like getting close to breaching the main monorepo at Google: google3.

If this was on the black market and the leak included unreleased models and training material, it would easily be worth tens of millions. Even reporting crypto smart contract flaw pay way more than that on average of $100k - $10M.

Come on.

muglug

9 hours ago

My guess is that OpenAI has done a lot more to prevent exfil of their model weights than the codebase of their main web app and client.

fwlr

7 hours ago

Perhaps the exploit was not as large or dangerous as the team says it is.

redox99

5 hours ago

It's a monorepo and they're at over 1 million PRs. There's surely some juicy stuff there.

sudo_cowsay

9 hours ago

The unfortunate truth of doing the right thing. Also, correct me if I'm wrong but there are too many bad things out there and companies can't give 1 million bounty for stuff like that. I'm sure they could but in the long run, wouldn't it be unsustainable?

Barbing

9 hours ago

It’s an interesting bet then.

Pay next to nothing every time, accept one financially-depressed researcher sale to blackhats causing tremendous business disruption every n years. Cheaper than honest payouts to [keep] researchers [honest]? Keep paying chump change. (Booo)

Shank

9 hours ago

How much would a nation state pay for a complete copy of OpenAI’s github repositories? I doubt there are many full chains laying around like this.

kdkdkwkdjej

9 hours ago

No more unsustainable than these companies already are by default. The bounty should have been proportionate to how important and pressing the findings were.