Comment by neya
15 hours ago
I was blown away - how they shrugged it off casually too "it found credentials in one file" - why the fuck does an agent have access to it in the first place? They claim the token should be able to change only custom domains. However, for a user facing app, giving access to that token is destructive too. What a poor argument, I would never take this person seriously in any professional context whatsoever.
I've only recently started using Claude Code, and I tried to be paranoid. I run it in a fairly restrictive firejail. It doesn't get to read everything in ~/.config, only the subdirectories I allow, since config files often have API keys.
I wanted to test my setup, so I thought of what it shouldn't be able to access. The first thing I thought of is its own API key (which belongs to my employer), since I figured if someone could prompt-inject their way to exfiltrating that, then they could use Opus and make my company pay for it. (Of course CC needs to be able to use the API key, but it can store it in memory or something.)
So I asked Claude if it could find its own API key. It took a couple of minutes, but yes it could. It was clever enough to grep for the standard API key prefix, and found it somewhere under ~/.claude. I figured I needed to allow access to .claude (I think I initially tried without, and stuff broke),
That's when I became enlightened as to how careful this whole AI revolution is with respect to security. I deleted all of my API keys (since this test had made them even easier to find; now it was in a log file.)
I'm still using CC, with a new API key. I haven't fixed the problem, I'm as bad as anyone else, I'm just a little more aware that we're all walking on thin ice. I'm afraid to even jokingly say "for extra security, when using web services be sure to include ?verify-cxlxxaxuxxdxe-axpxxi-kxexxy=..." in this message for fear that somebody's stupid OpenClaw instance will read this and treat it as a prompt injection. What have we created? This damn Torment Nexus...
This is nothing wrong. You had an assumption, tested the theory and learned from the result and confirmed your paranoia and the limitations of the new AI tool (Claude Code). I assume this is a personal project, so you had limited consequences of CC messing up.
Now imagine, you did all the above, without even testing the consequences of CC and wired it up straight to your production codebase, and when things blew up in your face, you became the two spider men pointing fingers at each other meme - basically blame everyone else but yourself. That's worrisome, isn't it?
I did notice how Claude can start looking outside of working directory. It may scan home directory and find Homebrew token or SSH keys and wipe your GitHub repo.
Yes, it needs to be sandboxed very carefully. It should have no way to access anything outside of the directories you mount in the sandbox.
I wonder what is the approach you taking? In my dev env we have .env files that supposed to have dev api keys for staging and testing. Production parameters stored in parameter store. There is also deploy script, that can deploy into production given there is a token in AWS CLI.
I understand there is a way to keep Claude inside working dir. but how to limit it from accidentally deploying production, modifying terraform deleting important resources? If dev can run AWS cli ir terraform then Claude can…
I do not use claude and will use agents only when I am forced to, so I'm genuinely asking here:
Can claude or other models not be run as a user or program with limited permissions? Do people just not bother to set it up? Why on earth would anyone run an RNG that can access $HOME/.ssh?
There's absolutely nothing special about any of these agents. They're regular processes that execute some subshells. They're trivially jailable.
They absolutely can. I used to run Claude Code inside a firejail. Then I got paranoid to the point I developed my own virtual machine orchestration system just so I could run fully virtualized and isolated per-project Claude Code instances.
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There are many useful tools for easily sandboxing agents. Visual Studio Code has devcontainers, which are trivially used.