Comment by _pdp_
6 days ago
What follows next is purely speculation and it is based on my own observations and thoughts but based on what I've seen the old RBAC models, while being almost broken before, now it is fully broken, with the fact that now coding assistants and engineers are working on multiple unrelated projects simultaneously - especially working on wild experiments they had no time for previously. The risk of supply chain issue has increased dramatically in the enterprise.
Again, I am not saying it is related but I think it has an impact.
Now in many places it is encouraged by coders and managers to vibe stuff on their own devices. Soon or later it will become a problem, especially for those that have no idea what they are doing.
I am not saying it is related but I feel that it coincides perfectly.
I just cannot believe there is no underlaying thread going through all of these recent supply chain issues, and yes there are some hacking groups that specialise in this, sure, but it is because the bounty is plentiful.
Just to clarify, and I know you weren't saying they are related, but this has absolutely nothing to do with AI or vibe coding or manager code.
It's a continuation of the Shai Halud worm and the lack of security around developer dependnecy installations, which has existed for a very long time.
Hackers have figured out that developers themselves are an ideal target due to how easy it is to trick them into installing something and how much private information they have on their machines (creds, cloud clis, mcps, etc.).
> due to how easy it is to trick them into installing something
You have tools from large corporations where the official installation procedure involves copy pasting a command from a random blog post, run it with sudo and watch it download and execute a script from a random filehost. This is somehow deemed acceptable by everyone involved.
Meanwhile I can't use teams in our meeting rooms, since any form of internet access was deemed a security risk in rooms where customer projects could be discussed. This is in a day and age where 90% of customer meetings are done over the internet.
Anyone trying to follow sane practices in this industry just asks to end up in a padded cell.
> Anyone trying to follow sane practices in this industry just asks to end up in a padded cell.
Same as it ever was.
> Meanwhile I can't use teams in our meeting rooms, since any form of internet access was deemed a security risk in rooms where customer projects could be discussed. This is in a day and age where 90% of customer meetings are done over the internet.
I hope this is in jest. Are you saying in order to discuss any customer project you have to book a meeting room? So no discussions of customer projects at the open plan desks or even in your boss' office for fear that something might overhear that conversation? Or is this only when the customer happens to be on-site to discuss their project? Does your organization assign U.S. Military style NICKA code names to everything?
> This is somehow deemed acceptable by everyone involved
By some, not all. It's been crazy from the start and it is still crazy to pipe a script to bash!
As with many other things, AI exacerbates this problem. It’s so easy for many more of things things to happen unattended and in greater volume, and the AIs themselves can be tricked into doing these things, not helped by their patten of “prompt the user to approve 30 different inscrutable pythons and bash scripts”.
> Now in many places it is encouraged by coders and managers to vibe stuff on their own devices. Soon or later it will become a problem, especially for those that have no idea what they are doing.
Yes in our place too. "You better do as much as possible with AI or you will be left behind" dogmas etc.
It's the stupid IoT hype all over again. No concern for security, just trying to be the first in the pack.
"MongoDB is the hottest thing! No default creds, who cares about that! ONWARD TO PRODUCTION, SOLDIERS!"
MongoDB is web scale.
Instead of learning from past mistakes, it seems we need to keep making the same ones over and over.
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I argued for years that we had too few workers for our total project count and management argued that most projects were idle and so it was fine to have so many per worker.
Welp.
I think web-based IDEs like GitHub Codespaces (but even VSCode with tunnels) is part of the solution because at the very least you can get an isolated dev environment per project. I've been advocating for this for as long as I remember.
Unfortunately, most developers don't like them so it is a though sell.
Why do most developers not like it? Is it because the browser is a terrible platform for text editors since there is no proper key mapping, or access to proper debuggers, or there is too much latency, and no access to cli tools?
You make it sound like you are surprised, but everyone who has tried this knows it's crap and a band aid at best.
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Web-based IDEs like VSCode on github just had a 1-click github token stealing vulnerability: https://blog.ammaraskar.com/github-token-stealing/
You could argue this is probably on GitHub for creating a token here that gives blanket access to all repos vs a scoped token for just the repo.
Why would I ever want to use a browser based solution instead of local VMs? If you're worried about VM escapes then you have bigger problems (and hopefully a full time security team supporting you).
Edit: I realize in hindsight this comes across as overly negative. I think those are great solutions to have available for when you are working with a suboptimal local setup for whatever reason. I just don't think they're the default choice let alone any sort of ideal to strive for.
Is the theory here that the browser cannot be co-opted to infect web-based repositories? Also: thinking of how yt-dlp can integrate with browser cookies now and the malware paths that opens up. (This is part of why Chrome wants HSM cookies, I expect: DRM and opsec!)
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This is the leg of the cycle when we go back to mainframes & centralized computing? With all the datacenter build out; why wouldn't you want your services adjacent to the LLM processing centers?
> I think web-based IDEs like GitHub Codespaces (but even VSCode with tunnels) is part of the solution
I am against proprietary SAAS online in browser dependencies.
I like the remote editing tools for VS Code quite a bit...
Do you mean that role based access control (RBAC) should be replaced by something else? Or that just the specific RBAC models in use are broken?
I personally think the, perhaps confusingly named, capability based security models are the way of The Future.
ABAC/Capability and very granular policies for both actions and actions on behalf of others with the right sort of resource-based policies as well. And the apps need to be capability constrained and sandboxed.
Gonna be a hard nut to crack to implement this across the supply chain.
Transitive dependencies are a bitch.
My work projects are on separate hardware in a separate network that doesn't allow for AI agents... for better and worse.
I have used agents for a few components externally, that I've adopted/used internally... but those were 100% code reviewed, not vibe coded. One was an intro animation using a couple SVGs and CSS. Another was an image zoom control where I needed some behaviors and not a lot extra. Both significantly tweaked by hand as well.
I'm more a proponent of working as a gatekeeper as opposed to vibe coding... Though I think a better term would be nice.
> Now in many places it is encouraged by coders and managers to vibe stuff on their own devices. Soon or later it will become a problem, especially for those that have no idea what they are doing.
Idiots must suffer.
one could also vibe-code vanilla, no dependencies.
You can vibe code safely for sure.
I am not saying vibe coding is the issue. The issue is that a typical developer might be working on a lot more projects that run concurrently then they used to. And because of the various nature of the project the risk is significantly increased.
Scale this across the workforce and you not just doubled the problem.
You can vibecode docs and tests also but I'm truly not seeing more of those.
In the end it can just be a culture thing. A dev who was going to write docs and tests before is going to have a LLM generate docs and tests today. Same with safe practices and defensive coding. The machine does whatever you want from it, for most that's "just get the job done I don't care". So that's the output.
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"Practice safe vibecoding, stop the cycle of infections!"
You can also fork everything and maintain local versions that you much more easily resolve conflicts with upstream with AI and get the best of both worlds while you work through the backlog of internally reimplementing all dependencies, which even with AI will take a long time.