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Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

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Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#111

Post by evertedsphere »

hedora wrote: post #82
saurik wrote: post #38

A number of replies here are noting (correctly) how this doesn't have much to do with AI (despite some sentences in this article kind of implicating it; the title doesn't really, fwiw) and is more of an issue with cloud providers, confusing ways in which security tokens apply to data being shared publicly, and dealing with big data downloads (which isn't terribly new)... ...but one notable way in which it does implic…

Occasionally, I’ll talk to someone suggesting a dynamically typed language (or stringly-typed java) for a very large scale (in developer count) security or mission critical application. This incident is a good one to point back to.

types have nothing to do with this, strictly speaking; the same problems would exist if you serialised structures containing functions in a typed language to e.g. a dll or a .class file and asked users to load it at runtime

the problem is in fact the far more subtle principle of "don't download and run random code, and definitely don't make it the idiomatic way to do things," and i'm not sure you can blame your use of eval()-like things on the fact that they exist in your language in the first place

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#113

Post by bunderbunder »

jklehm wrote: post #97
bunderbunder wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pickle files are cringe, but they're also basically unavoidable when working with Python machine learning infrastructure. None of the major ML packages provide a proper model serialization/deserialization mechanism. In the case of scikit-learn, the code implementing some components does so much crazy dynamic shit that it might not even be feasible to provide a well-engineered serde mechanism without a major rewrite.…

ONNX[0], model-as-protosbufs, continuing to gain adoption will hopefully solve this issue. [0] https://github.com/onnx/onnx

ONNX is cool, but it still only supports a minority of scikit-learn components. Some of them simply aren't compatible with ONNX's basic design.

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#115

Post by dheera »

saurik wrote: post #38

A number of replies here are noting (correctly) how this doesn't have much to do with AI (despite some sentences in this article kind of implicating it; the title doesn't really, fwiw) and is more of an issue with cloud providers, confusing ways in which security tokens apply to data being shared publicly, and dealing with big data downloads (which isn't terribly new)... ...but one notable way in which it does implic…

Many people are also unaware that json is way, way, way faster than Python pickles, and human-editing-friendly. Not that you'd use it for neural net weights, but I see people use Python pickles all the time for things that json would have worked perfectly well.

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#116

Post by hypeatei »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #67

Two of the things that make me cringe are mentioned. Pickle files and SAS tokens. I get nervous dealing with Azure storage. Use RBAC. They should depreciate SAS and account keys IMO. SOC2 type auditing should have been done here so I am surprised of the reach. Having the SAS with no expiry and then the deep level of access it gave including machine backups with their own tokens. A lot of lack of defence in depth goin…

Absolutely, RBAC should be the default. I would also advocate separate storage accounts for public-facing data, so that any misconfiguration doesn't affect your sensitive data. Just typical "security in layers" thinking that apparently this department in MSFT didn't have.

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#118

Post by NegativeK »

j245 wrote: post #75
mymac wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pentests where people actually get out of bed to do stuff (read code, read API docs etc) and then try to really hack your system are rare. Pentests where people go through the motions, send you report with a few unimportant bits highlit while patting you on the back for your exemplary security so you can check the box on whatever audit you're going through are common.

From my understanding as a non security expert: Pentest comes across more as checking all the common attack vectors don’t exist. Getting out of bed to do the so-called “real stuff” is typically called a bug bounty program or security researching. Both exist and I don’t see why most companies couldn’t start a bug bounty program if they really cared a lot about the “real stuff”

The checkbox form exists because crooked vendors are catering to organizations who are intentionally lazy about their cybersecurity.

Real penetration tests provide valuable insight that a bug bounty program won't.

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#119

Post by unoti »

wodenokoto wrote: post #63

I really dislike how Azure makes you juggle keys in order to make any two Azure things talk together. Even more so, you only have two keys for the entire storage account. Would have made much more sense if you could have unlimited, named keys for each container.

> I really dislike how Azure makes you juggle keys in order to make any two Azure things talk together.

Actually there is a better way. Look into “Managed Identity”. This allows you to grant access from one service to another, for example grant access to allow a specific VM to work with your storage account.

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#120

Post by alphabetting »

mola wrote: post #85

It's always funny that wiz's big security revelations are almost always about Microsoft. When wiz's founder was the highest ranking in charge of cyber security at Microsoft in his previous job .

Would be kind of surprising if that weren't the case.
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