Oh, and after resuming the tests, the Artifactory message board was reestablished almost immediately, but it took a number of days to fully breach HF. In all that time, after seeing Artifactory compromised the first time, nobody even bothered to check if those naughty agents were at it again.
This is all documented by OAI, with a timeline, here:
https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-...
To know that there was a serious weakness in the sandbox, and to just patch an exploit and resume with nothing else changed and no monitoring, in a test where all guardrails were off, the bots were thirsty for some internet juice, and Artifactory was a clear target? This is where even a half-skilled human should have decided that this wasn't a great idea.
The more you look into the details of this thing, the more it does your head in.
This annoys me so much. Everyone is acting as if the model went rogue, when it really did exactly what it's been trained for. This story is so fucking engineered.
Yes. It’s a fairly simple SSRF attack as far as I can tell. One of the first things I’d try. Especially considering that I would already be armed with the information that I have no internet access except through a thing that downloads things off the internet for me.
Calling it zero day makes it sound elusive. It’s a bug in closed software that has like 40 CVEs this year alone. Tools like that, especially in internal networks, don’t get much scrutiny and are often riddled with issues.
1. I clicked into ~20 of the recent CVEs, and it looks like about all of them came from openai or anthropic research?
2. In fact, every CVE in the last 2 years came from the last few months -- i.e. other than these recent CVEs, you'd have go back more than 2 years ago to find a single other CVE.
>>> Are "half skilled human operators" "easily" able to find zero-day vulnerabilities in a sandbox
>> Calling it zero day makes it sound elusive ... like 40 CVEs this year alone.
> [The CVEs] came from openai or anthropic research? In fact, every CVE in the last 2 years came from the last few months
I still don't understand how you can specifically point to zero CVEs being discovered by humans for year(s), then ~40 being discovered once OpenAI/Anthropic start looking at it, as the only(?) piece of data you provided to support the claim "a half skilled human" could have "easily" found/done this?
It's definitely worthwhile to point out that LLMs have changed the economics of looking; we can now look in far more places far more quickly than we could before. But the above points were that the vulnerability itself happened to be an easy one that didn't intrinsically require an LLM.
Means the problem lies elsewhere: deciding to use it at all. That points again towards the lack of basic SysAdmin skills.
Said another way: if Artifactory was somehow a common gatekeeper between grounded techy teenagers and their access to internet porn, this would have been found ages ago.
If we exclude those who lack "basic" level skills, what solution would most typically be used by someone who has "basic" level skills for this use case? And what solution for someone with "expert" (or medium) level skills?
The issue we're discussing happened while running ExploitGym. Doesn't the ExploitGym arXiv test explicitly have external "outbound" network requests as allowed for package installation and supporting toolchain installation?
I’ve looked at the CVEs a bit more and it’s just very clearly a pattern of systemic issues with validation, be it URLs or tokens.
It just shouldn’t be that hard to believe that OpenAI just didn’t care very much and thus did a crap job. The whole model of the sandbox is terrible, so why would they bother thinking about the implementation much?
It really isn't a high profile target, lots of fairly obvious issues is to be expected. Which is not at all a good thing, but very obviously the status quo for large software.
Not to mention the only thing the artifactory instance got you was indirect internet access which is irrelevant if the artifactory instance is publicly exposed.
Also it might not be obvious but artifactory is proprietary software that used to be open source, so nobody is looking at the code anymore.
Any closed source program is insane liability. Trusting in competence of one company is the easiest way to get burnt.
The reason we have to test it isn't because our product would randomly break into someone else's system, but because it's meant to be sometimes deployed in systems disconnected from the Internet and we need to make sure the image provided contains all the necessary parts to create and operate such a system.
The whole setup where they "tried" to isolate the test but failed is laughable. It's like if an adult tried but failed to tie their shoelaces.