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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

#221

Post by inigyou »

stingraycharles wrote: post #168
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?

I don’t think everyone does this at all. Maybe very small scale companies, but I would have expected a company like Huggingface to have better security standards. As soon as you’re big enough to have dedicated devops people, you shouldn’t be doing this anymore.

You have just been shown an example of "everyone does this". You have gotten moralistic and said they shouldn't do this, but how does this refute the fact that they do?

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#222

Post by sscaryterry »

jibal wrote: post #191
Analemma_ wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Indeed, people like you, who gulp up reports by big tech companies without any evidence.

The stupidity lies in not accepting that everyone has an agenda.

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#223

Post by sscaryterry »

calebkaiser wrote: post #183
docapotamus wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's what is being said. False flag, I presume in this scenario is to say were going to do something about the impending "AI threat" and to be associated with it. There is probably little threat, but to some investors this starts to look like perceived "AGI". Getting your name involved in the hype is marketing 101

I think the commenter is saying that OpenAI committed a false flag operation, not Tailscale. For Tailscale, this may very well be marketing, but it would be strangely self defeating for OpenAI to do something like what is being suggested. Showing that you failed to govern your model is a pretty poor way to say "We're the only ones who should be trusted to govern frontier models".

This. It isn't only OpenAI, but Anthropic too now. They're normalising bad governance, acting with impunity.

Honestly, this is a crime in the UK, and I'm sure a number of other places globally.

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#224

Post by goolz »

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.

Nothing more to add than I echo it all and will continue being a happy customer after seeing this. A rarity in today’s world, kudos to them.

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#225

Post by literalAardvark »

kennywinker wrote: post #44
iamspoilt wrote: post #35

Quoting Tailscale: This is our very Canadian apology: sorry you stepped on our toes. The attack didn’t exploit Tailscale, and Tailscale didn’t cause the compromise. But, we didn't stop it. Next time, we will.

Next time we will - provided you further lock yourself into our ecosystem.

Help help I'm being oppressed by the company with the open source everything.

- sent from my iPhone

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#226

Post by stingraycharles »

inigyou wrote: post #221
stingraycharles wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think everyone does this at all. Maybe very small scale companies, but I would have expected a company like Huggingface to have better security standards. As soon as you’re big enough to have dedicated devops people, you shouldn’t be doing this anymore.

You have just been shown an example of "everyone does this". You have gotten moralistic and said they shouldn't do this, but how does this refute the fact that they do?

One example from a root cause analysis of a security incident like this is not evidence for “everyone does this”. I believe that Huggingface, with 250+ employees, is an outlier.

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#228

Post by tremon »

submitaticket wrote: post #200
sandeepkd wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A short-lived credential would reduce the risk that the key is still valid when an agent gains access

How does that work? If the agent is reading the credential from the live configuration, how short does the lifespan of a key need to be to prevent it from being used by an unauthorized process?

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#229

Post by claiir »

qlte wrote: post #140
walrus01 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure seems like it. Real humans don't write exclusively one sentence comments. It doesn't look like the post history of anyone here that I'm fairly sure is a real meat based mammal. It looks like someone gave an LLM an instruction to write exclusively short and snappy comments that are somewhat relevant to the original post.

> … comments that are somewhat relevant to the original post. This is a really common tell for HN bot accounts I find, even when effectively disguised/customized to drop the most obvious LLM cliches/em-dashes/etc. In a vacuum a specific comment may be more or less fine, or just a tad over baked like the parent post giving it an uncanny valley feel though otherwise passable. But even people who diligently try to stay…

Yea perhaps more generally, the LLMs might model the average HN comment (sample mean) quite well. But, they fail to model the sample variance at all.

Re: Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

#230

Post by Rafert »

ahofmann wrote: post #46

Wow, this article is super smart marketing by tailscale. Not only do they list all the nice and expensive features, that can help in such a situation but they also show that someone at huggingface made a very stupid thing by writing a reusable auth key in an env file. Everyone using mesh VPNs like tailscale, netbird etc. knows that this is like leaving the keys right at the door.

And in case people are looking for an open source alternative, Fly.io's tokenizer is a credential-injecting proxy: https://fly.io/blog/tokenized-tokens/
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