I am wondering when the whole Excel/Word universe is going to die. One can only hope.
Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word
31–40 of 317 posts
Re: Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word
#32By the way, this is the method that uni professors have been using to catch students using LLMs to do homework. Paste any document in any LLM and you'll risk that, it's not something Microsoft specific.
That is correct. Really, the only "new" thing is the propagation part
Re: Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word
#33> Malicious instructions hidden in an externally shared document could make Copilot alter drafted or edited documents in Word and propagate the attack to new documents. Oh no.
Mixing instructions and data is never a good idea. And I thought people understood that.
There are so many better alternatives but it seems many people really like Word for some weird reason. The last time I cared I had to look up how to make a document starting the page numbering on the 2nd page. It turns out there are totally different ways between different versions of Word. shrug.jpg
Re: Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't React, the most popular JS library, an example of that? Clearly people don't understand that
No it’s not an example of that. Do you store components in your component state?
He probably means JSX mixing HTML with Javascript...
function Greeting({ name }) { return Hello, {name}; }
Re: Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word
#35> Malicious instructions hidden in an externally shared document could make Copilot alter drafted or edited documents in Word and propagate the attack to new documents. Oh no.
Mixing instructions and data is never a good idea. And I thought people understood that.
Separation of instructions and data is artificial. Reality has no such separation. A general purpose system needs not to have them either; it's a design feature, not a bug.
People get too hung up on this fundamentally wrong idea, and the space of security, instead of progressing, is just running in circles like a headless chicken, making a mess of everything.
Re: Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word
#36I'm a programmer and a web-based AI user, but I don't want AI running on my local machine in any form. I've uninstalled Copilot and disabled AI in all local applications including the browser itself for exactly the reason described in this article. There's no way to protect your data from such an AI confusion attack by design. AI cannot discern your prompts versus text in file. The fact that an AI enabled word processor or email app could follow instructions embedded in a run-of-the-mill document or email is insane. Switching to Linux, BSD or another open source operating system is the only real solution to this problem.
Re: Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word
#37I may be naive here but can the hidden text not be flagged or outright removed before being passed to copilot? Why would there not be consideration for what a human user can see, especially if the hidden text was added by copilot in the first place?
There are many ways to hide text. Low contrast, small font size, image covering part of the text, too-small box cutting off some parts, custom font making certain words look like other ones... Alerting the user about such formatting issues would be helpful (e.g. also when you try to redact something by drawing a black rectangle over it without removing the text underneath) but you probably shouldn't rely on it for security.
As long as Copilot can't be prevented from acting on instructions in its input, it would be safer to not make untrusted document content part of the input, similar to how macros in untrusted documents aren't executed by default.
Re: Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word
#38It's VBScript/macro worms all over again!
Except turning off macros means losing our precious slop generators! Won't someone think of the fossil fuel industry?
Re: Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word
#39Re: Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word
#40> Malicious instructions hidden in an externally shared document could make Copilot alter drafted or edited documents in Word and propagate the attack to new documents. Oh no.
Breaking just now:
- Erroneous information left in plain sight in an externally shared document could make Copilot - or any other agentic system, including LLMs and protein-based intelligence, alter drafted or edited documents in Word (or any other program, or with pen and paper) and propagate the errors to new documents.
In other news:
- Many humans still believe in silly superstitions like flat Earth or that code and data are fundamentally distinct, or that control vs. data plane is anything more than a design opinion that doesn't apply to the universe in general.