Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

tailscale.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 239 posts

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#201

Post by AbstractH24 »

sneak wrote: post #179
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.

“How can we make this thing, that has nothing to do with us, about us and how good we are?” (top story on HN) I get it, Tailscale is great and all, but, are we being serious right now?

Flip side “get ahead of the narrative before we’re thrown under the bus”

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#202

Post by AbstractH24 »

cortesoft wrote: post #177
packetslave wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you're under the impression that the purpose of a company blog is WHAT, exactly?

I don't think anyone is faulting Tailscale for using their blog to advertise, and no one is faulting Tailscale for how they handled this situation in general, or their response to it. The issue is acting like their response is 'brave' in anyway, or altruistic. It can be considered admirable only to the extent any company doing a good job running its business can be. This is a good, smart response to what happened. Th…

It feels like Anthropic has made this game of “trust me, I’m the good guy” the thing to do in 2026

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#203

Post by submitaticket »

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…

Where is he preaching the religion of short-living credentials. He literally agrees with the high cost/friction to implement.

> Unfortunately, dynamic credentials are a lot of work to set up and maintain. When security requires work, people don't do it.

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#204

Post by AbstractH24 »

moontear wrote: post #126
inigyou wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet everyone seems to do it anyway. Fine for medium security, but maybe the product needs a high security mode that enforces inconvenient decisions?

Not sure that everyone does this anyway. There are some good security postures you can take with Tailscale as well and leaving an auth key lying around is not one of them. Tailscale lock should have been enabled. For CI/CD purposes the auth key could have set specific tags, which would result in specific ACLs that limit blast radius. The auth key could have a short validity. You could actually use the Tailscale API t…

I see a tailscale product that is basically “middleware for agents” using whatever buzzword you feel (maybe “orchestration”) coming soon

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#205

Post by submitaticket »

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.

Not the quickest win if you're spinning up ephemeral runners for CI.

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#206

Post by qntmfred »

drchaim wrote: post #121

How are you folks handling secrets in a simple way? - sops , ansible vault and similar seems too weak given the agent is gonna read them at some point if you have the pass available. - proxy injection seems too complicated and doesn’t cover all use cases.

I recently finally fully moved all my projects away from .env (for local dev) to infisical, thinking it'd be the way to stop agents from (accidentally?) peeking at my secrets. while I'm still glad I made the move, it's clear that local agents are still moving around my local environment with sufficient privileges and autonomy to use infisical cli however it wants. my work isn't high stakes enough to matter much and I have rotation scripts on hand, but it's hard to see how to fully close the door against this type of risk at this point.

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#207

Post by altairprime »

MostlyStable wrote: post #85
packetslave wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you're under the impression that the purpose of a company blog is WHAT, exactly?

I have recently noticed that the words "ad" or "marketing" have become, in and of themselves, with no additional information or context, slurs or dismissals. I understand why. The modern internet has turned advertising into a morass of constant bombardment and the only sane response is to block as much as possible and ignore as much else as possible. But it's unfortunate because, in some sense, ever single thing that…

Fun corollary: Self-promotion is only considered to be advertising, marketing, or spam when it’s describing someone else’s self-promotion. When it’s describing one’s own, it’s not a perjorative :)

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#208

Post by navigate8310 »

ahmedehab_01 wrote: post #116

This actually shows that it was a human error on HuggingFace's end that led to that "breach". I would say HuggingFace needs to prioritize both security metrics/alerts and metrics/alerts for node count. And not leave long-lived keys accessible easily like this. It would have been way more groundbreaking if the agent found an actual vulnerability in Tailscale.

Huggingface being a laboratory harbouring dangerous models in hibernation, should've been more careful from start

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#209

Post by theozero »

Of course there's no single solution and a multi-layered defense is needed... But as the article mentions, a huge step is first getting credentials out of plaintext, and then out of the process entirely using a "credential broker" (proxy) pattern - that means injecting placeholders, and replacing them in a MITM proxy. It's important of course to isolate the agent from the broker via sandboxing.

Varlock (https://varlock.dev -- free, open source) is a complete config+secrets toolkit that helps manage secrets, pull them from various secure places, provides such a credential broker. There are a few others out there, but most require a specific vault tied to the broker, while ours is open source and uses plugins to pull secrets from wherever you want.

Many sandbox and other AI services are now building this as a feature into their platforms, but Varlock is meant to be a universal toolkit that you can apply anywhere, without being coupled to the platform's proprietary vault and solution.

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#210

Post by syngrog66 »

The root problem is that an LLM is like an automated sociopath. One whose source is opaque and effectively secretive. And the dominant AI vendors have a track record of carelessness and poor QA. "Ship it!" then hype.

And they lie and misrepresent, repeatedly, in spite of evidence we can see independently with our own eyes.

Post reply on HN