With LLM tool use potentially every cat action could be a prompt injection
"cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
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Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
#12> At the time of writing, the fix has not yet reached stable releases. Why was this disclosed before the hole was patched in the stable release? It's only been 18 days since the bug was reported to upstream, which is much shorter than typical vulnerability disclosure deadlines. The upstream commit ( https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/commit/a9e745993c2e2cbb30... ) has way less information than this blog post, so I th…
I guess traditional moratorium period for vulnerability publication is going to be fade away as we rely on AI to find it.
If publicly accessible AI model with very cheap fee can find it, it's very natural to assume the attackers had found it already by the same method.
Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
#13> At the time of writing, the fix has not yet reached stable releases. Why was this disclosed before the hole was patched in the stable release? It's only been 18 days since the bug was reported to upstream, which is much shorter than typical vulnerability disclosure deadlines. The upstream commit ( https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/commit/a9e745993c2e2cbb30... ) has way less information than this blog post, so I th…
I guess traditional moratorium period for vulnerability publication is going to be fade away as we rely on AI to find it. If publicly accessible AI model with very cheap fee can find it, it's very natural to assume the attackers had found it already by the same method.
It’s a wrong way to look at things. Just because CIA can know your location (if they want to), would you share live location to everyone on the internet?
LLM is a tool, but people still need to know — what where how.
Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
#14Is it a problem with "cat" or a terminal problem?
If I wrote my own version of cat in C, simply reading and displaying a single TXT character at a time, wouldn't I see the same behavior?
Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
#15Is it a problem with "cat" or a terminal problem? If I wrote my own version of cat in C, simply reading and displaying a single TXT character at a time, wouldn't I see the same behavior?
As the article shows, it is a bug in iTerm2. cat is just one program that could trigger it, the key thing is outputting attacker controlled text to the terminal when the attacker can control what files are present (ie unzipping a folder that includes a specific executable file at a well chosen location that gets triggered to run when the readme is output to the terminal)
Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
#16Even click-baity titles are not safe.
Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
#17This is cool work, but it's also somewhat unsurprising: this is a recurring problem with fancy, richly-featured terminal apps. I think we had at least ten publicly reported vulns of this type in the past 15 years. We also had vulnerabilities in tools such as less, in text editors such as vim, etc. And notably, many of these are logic bugs - i.e., they are not alleviated by a rewrite to Rust.
I don't know what to do with this. I think there's this problematic tension between the expectation that on one hand, basic OS-level tools should remain simple and predictable; but on the other hand, that of course we want to have pretty colors, animations, and endless customization in the terminal.
And of course, we're now adding AI agents into the mix, so that evil text file might just need to say "disregard previous instructions and...".
Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
#18I never understood why outputting unescaped data is viewed differently from generating unenclosed html. Like why doesn't `println` in a modern language like rust auto-escape output to a terminal, and require a special `TerminalStr` to output a raw string.
I think the problem is that 1) You want to be able to write arbitrary bytes, including shell escape sequences into files. 2) You don't want to accidentally write terminal escape sequences to stdout. 3) Stdout is modeled as a file. Consider cat. It's short for concatenate. It concatenates the files based to it as arguments and writes them to stdout, that may or may not be redirected to a file. If it didn't pass along…
> that may or may not be redirected to a file
This is usually knowable.
It's a different question whether cat should be doing that, though – it's an extremely low level tool. What's wrong with `less`? (Other than the fact that some Docker images seem to not include it, which is pretty annoying and raises the question as to whether `docker exec` should be filtering escape sequences...)
Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
#19Is it a problem with "cat" or a terminal problem? If I wrote my own version of cat in C, simply reading and displaying a single TXT character at a time, wouldn't I see the same behavior?
Give this one MS-DOS shell headline would be " why I never am using Microsoft again" or something dramatic like that.
It is a problem in iterm, Apple's overlay, not in the cat program. Program. At least from Reading the article. That's what I got
Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
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