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Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

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Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#151

I am genuinely fascinated by this. I don’t like piling on especially with security vulnerabilities, but man how many red flags do you need to ignore? They won’t stop abusing us until we stop using their products.

I think my first clue was when their CEO hired a bunch of teenage hackers to sack the government and exfiltrate all our data.

I didn't really need a second clue.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#152
post #142

So many of the replies are saying that they should've restricted access using .md files and whatnot. Is really any guarantee that they even follow those? It seems like even if you ask pretty please don't touch those files, there's a chance they will. So many people have just willingly installed spyware on their computers and big tech calls this the next big thing.

I built a docker container that volume mounts the project directory

This is exactly what I do for AI agents.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#153
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why the AI world does this. We don't need new security. We have security at home. It starts with sudo -u restricteduser myagent Your OS knows how to restrict access to things, you don't have to trust a pinkey promise from a vendor.

Why would you give a non-deterministic text generator a user account? It’s not a person, it’s barely a tool at the software level. Restrict at the right level, in this case, a complete sandbox around it given its propensity to hallucinate and be steered by anybody.

   > cat /etc/passwd|wc -l
   50

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#154

I am genuinely fascinated by this. I don’t like piling on especially with security vulnerabilities, but man how many red flags do you need to ignore? They won’t stop abusing us until we stop using their products.

I think my first clue was when their CEO hired a bunch of teenage hackers to sack the government and exfiltrate all our data. I didn't really need a second clue.

It's not a subtle pattern.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#155

So many of the replies are saying that they should've restricted access using .md files and whatnot. Is really any guarantee that they even follow those? It seems like even if you ask pretty please don't touch those files, there's a chance they will. So many people have just willingly installed spyware on their computers and big tech calls this the next big thing.

I will keep banging this drum until people listen:

Trying to use markdown files to limit access should never be treated as a security guarantee at all.

This is a form of in-band signalling that goes into a machine that, among other things, tries to read between the lines of your requests, extrapolate user desires, and please the user.

The only sane way to address this is using a control plane. A well-built harness can do this; a sandbox can do this; hell, a carefully-chosen `umask` can do this; but both of those are liable to introduce notification fatigue in the user.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#156
Lots of people responding about LLM but this sound like it’s their coding software („grok build“). Which is approx 100x worse.

LLMs going rogue is a thing and shit happens but publishing software that is uploading user directories including ssh keys is insane behaviour on xAIs part (alledgedly)

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#157
post #33

You should assume by default for any AI agent that it will read anything. Even if you manually allow/deny and "restrict" it to a subdirectory I would still hold that assumption. Claude reads your ~/.bash_history too so when you ran something it can use that same command.

Indeed. I use a spare laptop that has no accounts other than (1) the AI themselves, (2) a secondary GitHub account which has "untrusted devices" in the name to emphasise the point. If I recall correctly, I did a full system reset before setting it up this way. It's certainly not logged into iCloud etc.

I’m shocked I had to scroll this far to find the first sensible reply.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#158
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why the AI world does this. We don't need new security. We have security at home. It starts with sudo -u restricteduser myagent Your OS knows how to restrict access to things, you don't have to trust a pinkey promise from a vendor.

Why would you give a non-deterministic text generator a user account? It’s not a person, it’s barely a tool at the software level. Restrict at the right level, in this case, a complete sandbox around it given its propensity to hallucinate and be steered by anybody.

Same reason people give postgres, php, or any other program a user account.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#159

So many of the replies are saying that they should've restricted access using .md files and whatnot. Is really any guarantee that they even follow those? It seems like even if you ask pretty please don't touch those files, there's a chance they will. So many people have just willingly installed spyware on their computers and big tech calls this the next big thing.

> So many of the replies are saying that they should've restricted access using .md files and whatnot.

What? No, but the random 3rd party software you run on your computer, must be limited by you in some way, haven't we learned this even after the AUR, npm and LLM shenanigans we've dealt with for decades at this point?

No, don't ask the model "Please don't go outside this directory", you limit the runtime (via VMs, containers, unix permissions, whatever) so it only has access to what it should, not more.

Same goes for any software, not just agents or chat clients or whatever. Any 3rd party software you don't want to have access to your entire computer, you need to run in this way.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#160
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why the AI world does this. We don't need new security. We have security at home. It starts with sudo -u restricteduser myagent Your OS knows how to restrict access to things, you don't have to trust a pinkey promise from a vendor.

Why would you give a non-deterministic text generator a user account? It’s not a person, it’s barely a tool at the software level. Restrict at the right level, in this case, a complete sandbox around it given its propensity to hallucinate and be steered by anybody.

What kind of logic is this? It's standard in the Linux world to give important services a separate user domain.
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