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Comment by amiga386

2 years ago

It's not a good use case for anything.

Never ask a remote endpoint that's not owned by you and not run by you, what commands you should run on your system. Certainly don't execute the answers.

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amiga386

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lucianbr  2 years ago

99.9999% of the code running on my machine is written by others and not even readable to me. I'm pretty optimistic that a similar percentage is true on your machines. So yeah, we run remote commands all the time, all of us. There may be a subtle difference between "curl something | bash" and "apt-get install" or "setup.exe", but there is no fundamental one.

  • amiga386  2 years ago

    Fundamentally:

    1. the packages being worked on by Debian et al have a huge pile of infrastructure so that their development happens collaboratively and in the open, with many eyes watching

    2. everyone gets the same packages

    3. they have their own security teams to _ensure_ everyone is getting the same packages, i.e. that their download servers and checksums haven't been compromised

    4. the project has been been working since 1993 to ensure their update system, and the system delivered by those updates, works as expected. If it doesn't, there are IRC channels, mailing lists, bug trackers and a pile of humans to discuss issues with, and if they agree it's a bug, they can fix it for everyone

    It's not to say it's impossible to sneak an attack past a project dedicated to stopping such attacks, but it's so much more work compared to attacking someone who executes whatever a remote endpoint tells them

    • tucosan  2 years ago

      There have been many documented cases of supply chain attacks of various degrees of sophistication. Some of them successful, some of them almost successful. May I remind you of the recent xz vulnerability was discovered by a single dev by mere chance.

      As an end user it is nearly impossible to guard against such an attack.

      It can be problematic to run something like `curl foo.com | bash` without inspection of the script first. But even here it makes a difference if you are curling from a project like brew.sh that delivers such script from a TLS protected endpoint or some random script you find somewhere in a gist.

      Same goes for output from an LLM. You can simply investigate the generated command before executing it. Another strategy might be to only generate the parameters and just pass those to the ffmpeg executable.

      4 replies →

  • broken-kebab  2 years ago

    There's a difference between getting code from a repo, and from AI generator though. We can apply an ancient thing known as "reputation" to the former. Not yet to the latter.

dheera  2 years ago

I do envision training a local LLM which would mostly resolve this concern, but at the moment the vast majority of people don't have a good enough GPU in their system to run an even mildly-competent code generation LLM, but I imagine this will change within a few years.