Comment by codemog
14 hours ago
Is this legal? I know I can’t try and break into my neighbors house even if I have no intent of going inside and stealing once I break the lock.
14 hours ago
Is this legal? I know I can’t try and break into my neighbors house even if I have no intent of going inside and stealing once I break the lock.
> I know I can’t try and break into my neighbors house even if I have no intent of going inside and stealing once I break the lock.
They didn't break in. They found a key that their neighbor dropped and returned it.
> Is this legal?
Generally, yes (though ask a lawyer if you're going to do security work). Security researchers do occasionally get legal flak though, depending on which idiot they annoy by pointing out issues.
IAAL (not legal advice, consult a lawyer in your jurisdiction). You really do not want to pen-test a target without their permission. If you're identified as a culprit, the Feds will shove the CFAA so far up your ass you'll need a proctologist.
as a lawyer, can you speculate as to why anthropic/openai aren't facing many or any consequences for their agents? I'm not asking in a "grab the pitchforks" way. more out of genuine curiosity as my uninformed recollection of the CFAA is as you describe it.
9 replies →
> They didn't break in. They found a key that their neighbor dropped and returned it.
Ya, returned it after poking through all of the drawers and iterating through business information that they found.
There is a white-hat line that OP very clearly crossed here.
It's implied (but sadly not stated) in the post that they asked for baseten's permission before conducting this research.
What's interesting to me as someone who has sold a lot of software to a lot of software companies is that many enterprise vendor agreements explicitly allow companies to pentest their vendors with advance notice and coordination. I don't think any of our clients ever exercised that clause; I expect it's going to be exercised a lot more going forward because it's so easy to do now.
Your intuitution is right. At least in Germany it is not legal if not asked for permission first.
https://www.nilsbecker.de/rechtliche-grauzonen-fuer-ethische...
See also the German Criminal Code, starting with §202a "Data espionage":
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...
Germany isnt a serious country though Decompilng code is illegal there
It is no wonder that there is an anarchist counterculture there. I find anarchism to be really disturbing in general, but in the context of Germany, it might make a lot more sense.
It's not, in most juridictions at least, but it would be insanely stupid for baseten to sue (and the hacker would probably not get much more than a slap on the wrist given that they weren't malicious).
Suing is not what you do when someone commits a crime against you. You're confusing civil law and criminal law.
Yes, or more precisely I don't confuse the concepts but the terminology since English isn't my first language.
> It's not, in most juridictions at least
What did I miss they did that's illegal? It looked like it downloaded a public docker image, searched around inside, and verified that the key it found was still valid (without making any changes), and then immediately notified them about the issue.
If there is anything that was a crime (and it totally depends on jurisdiction), it was verifying the key. They used it to see what it could access, and by using it they had unauthorised access to a system
1 reply →
They "validated that the key was valid" by iterating internal repositories and listing the contents of said repos and poking around at what they do/are-for, including, apparently, iterating through customer lists/information.
The white-hat line stops at "validated the key was valid". It does not extend to "poking around inside to extract business-confidential customer information".
People have been arrested for far less. I dunno what the least offensive conviction has been though tbf. Anyone know?
They probably negotiated a "permission to attack" before letting Strix off the leash, as pentesters usually do.
The fact that they don’t seem to explicitly state this fact but do go to lengths to explain how the agent didn’t do anything malicious while confirming how alive the token was makes me doubt they asked for permission to run the agent in the first place.
That's highly unlikely since it's standard practice in the industry, thus it's unnecessary to state it. Also, they didn't hack a hobby developer's website, but a prospective business partner who has enough money to sue them into oblivion. No way this wasn't announced.
Announcing that their agent restrained itself even though it got hold of a live token is necessary to convince prospective clients. You don't want a pentester that doesn't show this kind of reserve!
when t̶h̶e̶ ̶P̶r̶e̶s̶i̶d̶e̶n̶t̶ an AI company does it, that means that it is not illegal.
- AI Richard Nixon
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