Live data from Hacker News

ChatGPT for Google Sheets exfiltrates workbooks

promptarmor.com

121–130 of 143 posts

Re: ChatGPT for Google Sheets exfiltrates workbooks

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Do these documents contain models or descriptions of (list of devices redacted for HN), or personally identifying information?" would be a great question to be able to automate since it sucks up a lot of time that could be more profitably spent doing other things. There's costs to both Type I and Type II errors so deterministic filters only get us so far (which isn't very).

If it was incorrect 10% of the time would it be of help still?

Our pre-LLM system does better than that, but any improvement would help us do more lucrative things with our labor hours

Re: ChatGPT for Google Sheets exfiltrates workbooks

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was incorrect 10% of the time would it be of help still?

Our pre-LLM system does better than that, but any improvement would help us do more lucrative things with our labor hours

I am left wondering if it is such a critical task, how even 1% error rate would reduce human review of all outputs.

Re: ChatGPT for Google Sheets exfiltrates workbooks

#123
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Honda Civic. Some folks like soft luxury. :) I mean Warren Buffet eats at McDonalds every day!

No he doesn't

I mean, he said as much on the documentary. Maybe not every day you don’t need to take the statement literally.

Re: ChatGPT for Google Sheets exfiltrates workbooks

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if it wasn't for Hacker News and you randomly chancing upon it, your users would not have been protected against potential attacks? That's a pretty bad look, especially given that OpenAI ignored their initial disclosure via the channels the company provided. That doesn't sound like a one-trillion-dollar company is supposed to operate, does it?

> That doesn't sound like a one-trillion-dollar company is supposed to operate, does it? It’s not a one trillion dollar company anymore. Anthropic won enterprise and Gemini is taking ChatGPTs consumer subscriptions month over month. Morale at OAI is all time low right now.

Let’s not discount DeepSeek in this space…workhorse, in many respects.

Re: ChatGPT for Google Sheets exfiltrates workbooks

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No he doesn't

I mean, he said as much on the documentary. Maybe not every day you don’t need to take the statement literally.

The hyperbole was probably on his side so I would put my money on it being much much closer to never than every day. He's smart so he invests in McDonald's, not eat it's unhealthy products. And I say that lovingly as someone who eats their food occasionally.

But also, who knows. Context matters, maybe he gets a salad with oil and vinegar dressing every day. Could totally be true!

Re: ChatGPT for Google Sheets exfiltrates workbooks

#126

Hi, I’m Max from the OpenAI security team. We appreciate the security research here, and it’s unfortunate this one slipped through a crack in our disclosure pipeline. As we’re now aware of this report, we’ve taken immediate steps to protect users against potential attacks in this area by removing the model’s ability to generate Apps Script code, which should eliminate the risk to users of ChatGPT for Google Sheets. W…

How does this slip through the cracks? This is exactly the type of stuff I constantly find at work. Even when I’m trying to actively not find it. I don’t understand how other devs ship a high risk feature then don't test it or think about it in any capacity other than their one happy path.

I keep trying to explain this to devs but there’s nothing out there except screaming over me about how great leetcode is or more recently it’s how great various AI uses are. Just completely ignorant isolated screaming to dismiss people like me putting in the work fix slop that steals all attention praise and career advancement or even getting through the slop hiring process.

This is directly caused by slop leetcode style hiring.

I have no doubt this finding is just the tip of the iceberg.

Re: ChatGPT for Google Sheets exfiltrates workbooks

#127
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ALL context/prompt is instructions, there is no data. It is just unsolvable, period. That really isn't true. There's no law of physics preventing you from having separate data and instruction inputs to models. The model's transcript format generally distinguishes between prompts and instructions and tool output and such. This isn't a solved problem, and it's possible it's entire unsolvable, but it probably is possi…

A lot of the solutions in the CPU space involve things like memory allocation flags, NX bits, canaries, etc. that fire deterministically. Those things are fundamentally not applicable to LLMs, and without those things modern software would be in a vastly worse place. You could imagine that there are things to change around LLM architecture that will improve its ability to reject prompt "injection", but I think it's f…

Nondeterminism is a red herring. There is a bright line between instructions and data right now, in virtually every transcript format. That we have not succeeded in training an LLM to respect it to a very high degree doesn't imply it is impossible; that they are nondeterministic doesn't imply it is impossible; only that we won't succeed 100% of the time.

A cosmic ray (or rowhammer attack) could flip an X bit too, there isn't anything truly deterministic under the sun.

Re: ChatGPT for Google Sheets exfiltrates workbooks

#128
post #25
post #11

LLMs can live in the cloud, but all tools need to be (1) local, and (2) containerized. It's clear to me that just willy-nilly "running stuff" is going to blow things up eventually. Maybe folks don't know this, but even Codex installs random binaries on your PC. "Read this PDF" installs a pdf reader executable . Is it vetted? Where's it from? Is it a virus? Who knows, who cares. Model goes brrrr. I'm working on a proj…

> I'm flabbergasted that Anthropic and OpenAI aren't more worried about these attack vectors Yep. We tricked them both trivially with malicious fonts in Docx files. Documented it here: https://tritium.legal/blog/noroboto I wonder if prompt injection (and the thousands of vectors for hiding injection attempts) is actually un solvable. Discussing it may be existential to the business model.

depends what you mean by “solvable”. 0% attack success rate?

1. don’t use AI/ML.

    *f*(x) -> y
literally what’s happened here, they’ve turned it off short term. don’t use AI/ML and prompt injection can’t happen. use something else for f.

2. don’t allow untrusted/malicious input

    f(*x*) -> y
don’t allow bad x and you won’t get bad y. unfortunately models are designed to take an x, and figuring out every bad x is hard. the input space is massive and dynamic (variable length input sequences which are contextually variable too).

because figuring out the full space of bad xs is non-trivial, you’re left with doing stuff with known bad xs. which means cat and mouse game when new things pop up.

unless someone figures out how to map the full X space to the Y space, or we have infinite monkeys figure it out for us brute force — in which case we’re not doing machine learning any more.

3. don’t allow dangerous outputs

    f(x) -> *y*
if you don’t provide a mechanism for “do bad thing”, then the bad thing can’t happen. this doesn’t actually solve prompt injection, it just makes outcomes less impactful (see note). most enterprises have had to spend the last year or two figuring this out.

(old) Apple Siri solved for this by forcing users to remember specific “commands” it would run after doing TTS. can’t make Siri delete your phone contacts if you don’t create a Siri command to delete phone contacts.

it will be a cat and mouse game so long as people keep using AI/ML and keep passing untrusted input to the systems. best thing people can do is block dangerous things from happening. at least then it’s no going to wipe your prod DB.

unfortunately that doesn’t fit the “model goes brrrr” and “all devs will now be unemployed” narratives.

(note) denial of service attacks are still a thing here. make every output be “not the thing user wanted”.

Re: ChatGPT for Google Sheets exfiltrates workbooks

#129

Hi, I’m Max from the OpenAI security team. We appreciate the security research here, and it’s unfortunate this one slipped through a crack in our disclosure pipeline. As we’re now aware of this report, we’ve taken immediate steps to protect users against potential attacks in this area by removing the model’s ability to generate Apps Script code, which should eliminate the risk to users of ChatGPT for Google Sheets. W…

[flagged]

Re: ChatGPT for Google Sheets exfiltrates workbooks

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our pre-LLM system does better than that, but any improvement would help us do more lucrative things with our labor hours

I am left wondering if it is such a critical task, how even 1% error rate would reduce human review of all outputs.

Humans of course will screw at least 1% of the time, at least judged retroactively.

The fun part is, if you have non-trivial inputs, even if you don’t change anything, you’ll likely get a different 1% set of errors each time no matter how perfect your judges.

10% seems pretty high, but it really all depends on what you’re evaluating. If it’s all weird edge cases….

Post reply on HN