Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are ramming tons of code into places without ever looking at it, it would follow that supply chain attacks would increase thusly.
Yeah, and ultimately no body cares. Everyone assumes it’s just some process miss, and we need to add another step to the process and move on. Fuck ups that would have killed the credibility of projects 10 years ago are now treated as “eeh what are you gonna do. Sometimes you ship malware. Will look into it”
Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library
51–60 of 196 posts
Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library
#52I cant wait to have no dependencies. An extreme example is now when I make interactive educational apps for my daughter, I just make Opus use plain js and html; from double pendulums to fluid simulations, works one shot. Before I had hundreds of dependencies. Luckily with MIT licensed code I can just tell Opus to extract exactly the pieces I need and embed them, and tweaked for my usecase. So far works great for hobb…
It should be feasible to design vulnerabilities which look benign individually in training data, but when composed together in the agent plane & executed in a chain introduce an exploit.
There’s nothing technical really stopping that from existing right now. It’s just that nobody has put the effort in yet.
Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library
#53I cant wait to have no dependencies. An extreme example is now when I make interactive educational apps for my daughter, I just make Opus use plain js and html; from double pendulums to fluid simulations, works one shot. Before I had hundreds of dependencies. Luckily with MIT licensed code I can just tell Opus to extract exactly the pieces I need and embed them, and tweaked for my usecase. So far works great for hobb…
The problem with this is now you are solely responsible for managing all of the changes, all of the variation of life. Chrome changed the shape of this API, you are responsible for finding it and updating it. Morocco changed when their daylight savings took effect, now you need to update your date/time handling code. There are a lot of these things that we take for granted because our libraries handle it for us, and…
So if you just need to do something simple like fire off a compute heavy background task and then get a result when it is done, you should probably just roll your own implementation on top of the threading API in your language. That'll probably be very stable. You don't need a massive background task orchestration framework.
People might object that the frameworks will handle edge cases that you've never thought of, but I've actually found in enterprise settings that the small custom implementations--if you actually keep it small and focused--can cover more of the edge cases. And the big frameworks often engineer their own brittle edge cases due to concerns that you just don't have.
So anyway, it isn't as simple as "dependencies are bad" or "dependencies are good", but every dependency has a cost/benefit analysis that needs to go along with it. And in an Enterprise, I'd argue that if you audit the existing dependencies you will find way too many of them that should be removed or consolidated because they were done for the speed of initial delivery and greenfielding. Eventually when you accumulate way too many of those dependencies the exposure to the supply chains, the need to keep them updated, the need to track CVEs in those deps, and the need to fix code to use updated versions of those dependencies, along with not have the direct ability to bugfix them, all combine to produce an ongoing tax of either continual maintenance or tech debt that will eventually bite you hard.
Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library
#54Shai-Hulud strikes again and continues to turn innocent packages into zombies. Think twice before looking at a package and most importantly, always pin your dependencies.
Yeah, pin the malware :p
You would have to publish the infected package first to infect others who haven't pinned their dependencies. With a simple pip install -U, and if the dependency is not pinned, then they will get the vulnerable version.
Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library
#55Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library
#56I cant wait to have no dependencies. An extreme example is now when I make interactive educational apps for my daughter, I just make Opus use plain js and html; from double pendulums to fluid simulations, works one shot. Before I had hundreds of dependencies. Luckily with MIT licensed code I can just tell Opus to extract exactly the pieces I need and embed them, and tweaked for my usecase. So far works great for hobb…
Your LLM isn't a dependency?
Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library
#57This week I was wondering whether using uv for managing Python versions is a good idea. From their website [1] > Python does not publish official distributable binaries. As such, uv uses distributions from the Astral python-build-standalone project. See the Python distributions documentation for more details. It points to this GitHub repo https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone which mentions this other…
Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library
#58For example, at that time, one way to distribute machine learning models was via Python pickles. Which are executable objects with no restriction built in. Models in this format could do anything on a computer where the model was imported. Such an early 'wild-west' ecosystem can definitely make security compromises easier and resulting supply chain attacks more common.
Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library
#59This week I was wondering whether using uv for managing Python versions is a good idea. From their website [1] > Python does not publish official distributable binaries. As such, uv uses distributions from the Astral python-build-standalone project. See the Python distributions documentation for more details. It points to this GitHub repo https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone which mentions this other…
python-build-standalone fetches CPython sources directly from python.org[1]. I don't even know where else we would get them from!
[1]: https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone/blob/a2...
Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library
#60This might just be the frequency illusion at play, but there seem to have been a number of high-profile supply chain attacks of late in major packages. There are several articles on the first few pages of HN right now with different cases. Looking back ten years to `left-pad`, are there more successful attacks now than ever? I would suspect so, and surely the value of a successful attack has also increased, so are we…
The value has increased, and that is what drives all these attacks. Cryptocurrencies are to blame in particular because they not just provided a way for money laundering the proceeds but also a juicy target in itself.
And what is stolen with today's malware? Cloud credentials. Either to use for illicit mining, which is on the decline, or to run extortion campaigns, which is made possible by cryptocurrencies. All too often it's North Korea or Iran running these campaigns.