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Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

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Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#191

Post by jibal »

Analemma_ wrote: post #149
sscaryterry wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is simply a case of Tailscale saying, we've got no idea what these guys (OpenAI) are talking about. All these incidents are scarce on technical details . Honestly, IMHO, OpenAI and Anthropic are now actively pushing for AI regulation, as a defence mechanism. These are false flag operations.

> These are false flag operations. The level of "I need to be the smartest person in the room" bullheaded skepticism on Hacker News has always been bad, but now with these latest LLM developments it is just completely out of control. A company is reporting an intrusion and how they plan to address the vulnerabilities it exposed in the future, and you're here going "seems shopped, I can tell from the pixels".

Profoundly stupid people like that are everywhere, not just HN.

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#192

Post by asdf88990 »

ivlad wrote: post #189

The whole post is a PR activity presented as some kind of analysis. It is bs. First, long-living credentials are the standard because the machinery to rotate them is complicated and, in fact, via indirection requires another set of long-living credentials. Out of all problems that any security engineering team has to solve at an organisation, this one stands high on the cost of implementation, adds friction to everyo…

This is why hardware keys or tpm is such a quick win.

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#193

Post by calebkaiser »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #185
calebkaiser wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm typically very skeptical of most content marketing/corporate PR. In the case of this incident, I struggle to see the clear upshot for OpenAI. It seems pretty unlikely they'd ever okay this intentionally as some sort of marketing. For one, it'd be pretty damning when it leaked that this was a setup, and it would 100% leak at some point. But more importantly, it really flies in the face of the general argument fron…

> It seems pretty unlikely they'd ever okay this intentionally as some sort of marketing. > Members of OpenAI's leadership team were actually in the middle of a Twitter spat with HuggingFace employees/open model advocates The point of these campaigns is to eventually invoke some sort of response from the government, such as banning open models, which OpenAI (and Anthropic) stand to benefit from.

So OpenAI would be proving to the government that they should be trusted to govern models, by failing to govern their models?

Plenty of shady stuff goes on in marketing, and I'm sure that OpenAI is going to opportunistically grab any potential upside from this (and any other situation, generally). But it is hard to imagine that this is part of a premeditated master plan that went something like:

- Advocate that open models are ungovernable and that frontier labs should be trusted to safeguard autonomous agents

- Immediately fail to safeguard their autonomous agent

- Intentionally hack the company who is most publicly critical of their view, and who happens to be the center of the open model universe

- Collaborate with said company on reports that show that open models were in fact critical to mitigating their rogue agent

- So tightly control access to this plan at their 8,000 employee company that it never leaks

All in the hopes of generally getting the attention of the government, who would then hopefully (and inexplicably, given the details here) decide to give OpenAI more power?

There are probably easier ways to lobby politicians.

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#194

Post by aborsy »

k8sToGo wrote: post #54
aborsy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does too many things, and the product has got too complex. I saw a year ago they were looking for someone just to help with complexity. I use it but feel uncomfortable, that it has large attack surface and LLMs will find exploits in it. Without taillock it makes no sense. Anyone on their coordination servers will be able to connect to your network.

> I use it but feel uncomfortable, that it has large attack surface and LLMs will find exploits in it Doesn't this apply to any application you use? How would it be different with plain wireguard?

No. If software is small enough, it can be proven.

There is formal verification of the protocol and aspects of code:

https://www.wireguard.com/formal-verification/

The code is small enough that can be reviewed.

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#195

Post by fragmede »

bakugo wrote: post #98
fragmede wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no! Marketing! Whatever shall we do‽

What are you trying to say here, exactly? Do you enjoy being bombarded by thinly veiled advertisements everywhere you go?

I'm trying to say that it's all advertising. What's interesting is the technical substance. Judge the post by the signal-to-noise ratio, not by whether the company had a marketing incentive to publish it.

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#196

Post by ivlad »

asdf88990 wrote: post #192
ivlad wrote: post #189

The whole post is a PR activity presented as some kind of analysis. It is bs. First, long-living credentials are the standard because the machinery to rotate them is complicated and, in fact, via indirection requires another set of long-living credentials. Out of all problems that any security engineering team has to solve at an organisation, this one stands high on the cost of implementation, adds friction to everyo…

This is why hardware keys or tpm is such a quick win.

Absolutely

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#198

Post by jibal »

vegenaise wrote: post #26
thansz wrote: post #4

As AI progress continues, it will be more difficult to stop AI intrusions and to detect them without resorting to direct AI countermeasures, which at some point will have humans out of the loop altogether. If leading and well-capitalized frontier labs can't control models or detect leakage/attacks in a reasonable time frame now , what is humanity going to do as those same labs continue in their pursuit of creating a…

it'll be moot. when we blow past 3°c in 15 years and there's widespread crop failure and billions are starving and dying, states and nations will collapse and with it industrial civ then ai and tech will be of little concern.

Yep. Most people are in denial and don't look up.

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#199

Post by madeofpalk »

tshaddox wrote: post #153
darkteflon wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the calculus is simply: “there’s no way I could do this better than Tailscale”.

That's true, but for some things I require a bar much higher than "at least as good as I could do."

“there’s no way I could do this better than Tailscale” is a much higher bar than "at least as good as I could do."

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#200

Post by submitaticket »

sandeepkd wrote: post #180
john_strinlai wrote: post #2

> No “vulnerabilities” in Tailscale were found or exploited, and that might make it even more uncomfortable for us. [...] But, we're a security tool. Their intrusion is our intrusion, and it's our job to take it seriously. im a happy customer of tailscale, so i am obviously biased, but i have a lot of respect for this. they could have just stayed quiet and i dont think anyone would have bat an eye.

Agreed its a tool, and it does not looks like any vulnerability was exploited on their end. However part of the blog is confusing to me. Long lived keys vs short lived have their own space in discussion, there are use cases, pros & and cons for the same. However it is not very clear how a short lived credential would have prevented the exploit in this case?

It would not have prevented the initial exploit. The agent gained access to the K8s cluster and read the Tailscale Auth Key from Cluster Secrets. A short-lived credential would reduce the risk that the key is still valid when an agent gains access.
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