Comment by RadiozRadioz
1 day ago
Well, yes. You don't find something if you don't look. The LLMs did the looking before the humans did, so they found the vulnerabilities.
It's definitely worthwhile to point out that LLMs have changed the economics of looking; we can now look in far more places far more quickly than we could before. But the above points were that the vulnerability itself happened to be an easy one that didn't intrinsically require an LLM.
Isn't the issue here that they used something like Artifactory for this purpose in the first place? It is not intended as a robust and secure packet manager for sandboxes. Why would any human look for vulnerabilities in Artifactory at all? So the scenario never arose where a human was incentivizied to scrutinize Artifactory, something that was never needed because it was never intended for the purpose of being a packet manager in a secure sandbox.
Means the problem lies elsewhere: deciding to use it at all. That points again towards the lack of basic SysAdmin skills.
Right, that’s basically what I’m saying. There’s not zero use for an attack like this, but it’s not a likely situation.
Said another way: if Artifactory was somehow a common gatekeeper between grounded techy teenagers and their access to internet porn, this would have been found ages ago.
> the lack of basic SysAdmin skills
If we exclude those who lack "basic" level skills, what solution would most typically be used by someone who has "basic" level skills for this use case? And what solution for someone with "expert" (or medium) level skills?
Don’t let software inside the sandbox access the internet on request. Have a package repository with approved software the agents might want, and push to it over a channel that is ingress only. I can imagine ways of breaking out of this, and come up with a lot more to mitigate, but this would be fairly basic stuff that’d be vastly superior.
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Well the most obvious thing would be to gate access to artifactory behind tools. E.g. apt get install is a tool and only the tool gets access to artifactory.