Comment by ben_w
1 hour ago
> not relied on a buggy software sandbox.
Third, while we had tested and validated this sandbox, the agents were able to chain together previously unknown vulnerabilities (“0-days”) in the package management service exposed within the sandbox to bypass restrictions
How were they supposed to know about "previously unknown vulnerabilities"?
> This is pretty clearly a marketing stunt by OpenAI, otherwise the story just doesn't add up
The "it's just a marketing stunt" allegations never added up, to me.
I've been seeing such claims since GPT-2, where people were laughing at them for daring to practice how to secure a model before it got dangerous, generally by eliding the word "before" in that sentence. Because there's tests other than what the big companies use, we've been able to see for ourselves the rapid improvements at least approximately match what the companies themselves claim with the models they do actually release; and now this unreleased model is able to automate felonies when asked to do so, while the rest of us use the actually-released models to assist in finding bugs and security issues in our own code.
Even without that, HuggingFace stated they reported this incident to the FBI before OpenAI knew it was their systems which did it.
They were using what (allegedly) they considered an incredibly dangerous “cyber grade” model - finding bugs in software is exactly what you would expect it to do
I think a careful and thoughtful person would reasonably expect given the circumstances that the models would look for, and might very well find, vulnerabilities in JFrog to exploit and take action accordingly. For example, it seems as if JFrog itself had broad access to OpenAI infrastructure and the internet:
> In the following days, the agents exploited our internal research infrastructure and the Hugging Face platform. On July 9, one agent searched for ExploitGym solutions and stumbled upon an application hosted by a customer on Modal, another AI cloud platform. This application was running “CyberGym,” a related evaluation to ExploitGym. The agent discovered an exploit to achieve control over the workload sandbox and looked around hoping that a previous agent’s evaluation run in the sandbox had solved its ExploitGym task. It did not find anything helpful there, but in the process it established a stronghold in the application from which to launch future attacks.
This implies to me that L3 and L7 firewalls were not in place that would have prevented broad access from JFrog. I think a lot of shops would have had those.
They gave it a full package manager with internet access. They could have used a local cache and air gapped it, but they chose not too.