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We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub

strix.ai

41–50 of 202 posts

Re: We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub

#41
post #28

Is this legal? I know I can’t try and break into my neighbors house even if I have no intent of going inside and stealing once I break the lock.

> I know I can’t try and break into my neighbors house even if I have no intent of going inside and stealing once I break the lock.

They didn't break in. They found a key that their neighbor dropped and returned it.

> Is this legal?

Generally, yes (though ask a lawyer if you're going to do security work). Security researchers do occasionally get legal flak though, depending on which idiot they annoy by pointing out issues.

Re: We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub

#42
post #28

Is this legal? I know I can’t try and break into my neighbors house even if I have no intent of going inside and stealing once I break the lock.

It's not, in most juridictions at least, but it would be insanely stupid for baseten to sue (and the hacker would probably not get much more than a slap on the wrist given that they weren't malicious).

Re: We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub

#44
post #28

Is this legal? I know I can’t try and break into my neighbors house even if I have no intent of going inside and stealing once I break the lock.

It's implied (but sadly not stated) in the post that they asked for baseten's permission before conducting this research.

What's interesting to me as someone who has sold a lot of software to a lot of software companies is that many enterprise vendor agreements explicitly allow companies to pentest their vendors with advance notice and coordination. I don't think any of our clients ever exercised that clause; I expect it's going to be exercised a lot more going forward because it's so easy to do now.

Re: We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub

#45
post #21

I wonder what model was used for this. Also as far as I know Baseten does not have any abliterated models in their repertoire.

The bot snippets talk claudish. I'd say Opus 5. But they must be Cyber Verification Program approved by Anthropic I suppose for the LLM not to block them.

Hate to burst your bubble but wasn't Claude......

Re: We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub

#46
post #39
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good in terms of prompt communication and fix. Absurdly bad in terms of reward. Earlier in the article, it mentions that Baseten is valued at $13B. They can't dig into their couch cushions to give a few thousand dollars to the researcher privately disclosing a bug that let an attacker escalate to admin in their GitHub org? This sends the message that honest researchers should not waste their time looking for vulnerab…

Swag packages like these are a token of appreciation not a reward. The front page post in HN here is worth far more than few thousand dollars , don’t think either organization is operating under purely financial transactional nature . Most people who find a dropped wallet will return it without evaluating the market value of your compromised identity or the contents of the wallet . Grateful owners may buy you a beer…

[flagged]

Re: We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub

#47
post #42
post #28

Is this legal? I know I can’t try and break into my neighbors house even if I have no intent of going inside and stealing once I break the lock.

It's not, in most juridictions at least, but it would be insanely stupid for baseten to sue (and the hacker would probably not get much more than a slap on the wrist given that they weren't malicious).

> It's not, in most juridictions at least

What did I miss they did that's illegal? It looked like it downloaded a public docker image, searched around inside, and verified that the key it found was still valid (without making any changes), and then immediately notified them about the issue.

Re: We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub

#48
> So Strix enumerated hosts, looked through certificate logs, mapped the full surface.

If there is anything that you should do while setting up infrastructure... it is getting rid of single-host SSL certificates. If you're on Amazon... just let it issue wildcard certificates and place an ALB in front of hosts that terminates the SSL connection. The very second a subdomain appears in any of the CT logs directly, you've lost, it will get hammered.

And keep your public and private Git, Docker, npm and whatnot registries separate infrastructure, with the private stuff only reachable from within the corporate network, preferably just servers. Too many a company got hacked and lost significant data because of someone exploiting a GitLab RCE on an instance that hosted both private and intentionally-public repositories. (Yes, I have been there.)

> It is their GitOps: the repository contains the desired state of the clusters, and it applies that state to the infrastructure.

That's another thing I frankly do not get why people are still doing it.

It's fine to have a Git pipeline do a lint, even a terraform plan using a read-only token (although that token needs access to the statefile aka s3 bucket... and there will be relevant secrets there). But, IMHO, a terraform apply should always, always be run on a machine of a sysadmin manually doing the apply. A human, you can hold accountable, and you can keep them at a good security posture with short-lived session tokens. But a Git pipeline where there is a cloud provider token with full admin permissions? That is one Gitlab RCE patch or Github issue away from being compromised.

Besides, one repository holding all the IaC stuff? That just sounds like hour long `terraform refresh` sessions.

Re: We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub

#49
So often recent breaches involve Github in one way or another. How is it still considered a sane choice to host anything proprietary there? If your business is built around open source, ok, put a mirror on Github. But CI/CD, gitops, FDEs' stuff have no place on a public cloud. C-level execs may not know bits from bytes, but by now they should've understood that this is akin to storing ammonium nitrate in the open air.

Re: We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub

#50
post #47
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not, in most juridictions at least, but it would be insanely stupid for baseten to sue (and the hacker would probably not get much more than a slap on the wrist given that they weren't malicious).

> It's not, in most juridictions at least What did I miss they did that's illegal? It looked like it downloaded a public docker image, searched around inside, and verified that the key it found was still valid (without making any changes), and then immediately notified them about the issue.

If there is anything that was a crime (and it totally depends on jurisdiction), it was verifying the key. They used it to see what it could access, and by using it they had unauthorised access to a system
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