{"id":47553092,"user":"GistNoesis","time":1774691127,"time_ago":"12 hours ago","type":"comment","content":"

TLDR: It's easy : LLM outputs are untrusted. Agents by virtue of running untrusted inputs are malware. Handle them like the malware they are.

>>> "While this web site was obviously made by an LLM"\nSo I am expecting to trust the LLM written security model https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/security.html

These guys are experts from a prestigious academic institution. Leading "Secure Computer Systems", whose logo is a 7 branch red star, which looks like a devil head, with white palm trees in the background. They are also chilling for some Blockchain research, and future digital currency initiative, taking founding from DARPA.

The website also points towards external social networks for reference to freely spread Fear Uncertainty Doubt.

So these guys are saying, go on run malware on your computer but do so with our casual sandbox at your own risk.

Remember until yesterday Anthropic aka Claude was officially a supply chain risk.

If you want to experiment with agents safely (you probably can't), I recommend building them from the ground up (to be clear I recommend you don't but if you must) by writing the tools the LLM is allowed to use, yourself, and by determining at each step whether or not you broke the security model.

Remember that everything which comes from a LLM is untrusted. You'll be tempted to vibe-code your tools. The LLMs will try to make you install some external dependencies, which you must decide if you trust them or not and review them.

Because everything produced by the LLM is untrusted, sharing the results is risky. A good starting point, is have the LLM, produce single page html page. Serve this static page from a webserver (on an external server to rely on Same Origin Policy to prevent the page from accessing your files and network (like github pages using a new handle if you can't afford a vps) ). This way you rely on your browser sandbox to keep you safe, and you are as safe as when visiting a malware-infested page on the internet.

If you are afraid of writing tools you can start by copy-pasting, and reading everything produced.

Once you write tools, you'll want to have them run autonomously in a runaway loop taking user feedback or agent feedback as input. But even if everything is contained, these run away loop can and will produce harmful content in your name.

Here is such vibe-coded experiment I did a few days ago. A simple 2d physics water molecules simulation for educational purposes. It is not physically accurate, and still have some bugs, and regressions between versions. Good enough to be harmful. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47510746","comments":[],"comments_count":0,"url":"item?id=47553092"}

Comment by GistNoesis