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We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub

strix.ai

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

#191

Post by throwitaway222 »

Watchtrail wrote: post #81
throwitaway222 wrote: post #54

It may make sense to change security practices so nothing has long term access. Everything should be rotated monthly, and maybe within a few years, hourly.

Running a one-person SaaS, the honest failure mode isn't "we decided not to rotate", it's "rotation isn't automated so it just never happens". A stale token from 2023 still being alive in 2026 says less about policy and more about nobody having a reason to touch that code path in three years. For a small team the fix that actually sticks is having the platform expire things by default (short-lived tokens, forced re-i…

One man operations that are in production - this is the perfect use case for that same person to run an agent to look for credentials that are not used, may have been exposed, etc... And obviously spend some cash on code review agents.

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

#192

Post by bdcravens »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #180
bdcravens wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many companies only keep logs as long as they're legally required to. It can't be discoverable if it doesn't exist ...

> It can't be discoverable if it doesn't exist ... That's great, and for some things the court can ask you "Well *why* haven't you got it?" and then you're fucked. Now you're explaining in front of a parliamentary committee why you destroyed what would turn out to be evidence.

If you automatically delete everything after the statutory retention period, you're fine. If you conditionally do so, that's when you have explaining to do.

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

#193

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

leptons wrote: post #95
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that companies are purely legal entities, and as such, cannot feel, much less empathize, simply by virtue of them not being living things

That's nonsense. "Companies" are not something non-human, they are run by humans , who do feel, empathize, and are living beings. Without these living-being humans, there would simply be no "company". Now how those humans that run the company behave is another thing - they are free to be greedy assholes, and a lot of them are, and some of them aren't - but that's still a human thing .

> "Companies" are not something non-human

Yes, they are not humans. They are not even living creatures. They are mostly-legal entities mostly for the purpose of contracting with humans or other legal entities.

> they are run by humans, who do feel, empathize, and are living beings

This is usually true, but it is orthogonal to whether the company (a legal entity) itself is a biologically living creature, which is the only thing capable of feeling*. To put a point on it: my lawnmower is also run by humans, but it does not have empathy for any grass or people that gets in its way. It mostly just goes where it is steered. A company is like that, except with less touching grass.

* — unless you want to argue semantics about what "feeling" means, even though the discussion is about "feeling" and "empathy" in the way humans experience it, and how that form of "empathy" does not exist for a nonliving legal entity which may or may not employ any actual humans

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

#195

Post by ErroneousBosh »

AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #187
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can't be discoverable if it doesn't exist ... That's great, and for some things the court can ask you "Well *why* haven't you got it?" and then you're fucked. Now you're explaining in front of a parliamentary committee why you destroyed what would turn out to be evidence.

"Our standard process is to only retain logs when legally required to, either due to being notified about a litigation or through legally mandated periods" is a fully complete sentence. Unless you're required to retain logs for some reason like a litigation hold or legally or contractually mandated retention period and you violate those, while the adversarial party might be annoyed at you for not retaining logs there…

> "Our standard process is to only retain logs when legally required to, either due to being notified about a litigation or through legally mandated periods" is a fully complete sentence.

And for some of that, the "legally mandated period" is "since the beginning of time itself".

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

#196

Post by ErroneousBosh »

bdcravens wrote: post #192
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can't be discoverable if it doesn't exist ... That's great, and for some things the court can ask you "Well *why* haven't you got it?" and then you're fucked. Now you're explaining in front of a parliamentary committee why you destroyed what would turn out to be evidence.

If you automatically delete everything after the statutory retention period, you're fine. If you conditionally do so, that's when you have explaining to do.

You're not fine, you're in the shit and have deleted the evidence that says it was someone else's problem all along.

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

#197

Post by sellmesoap »

r_lee wrote: post #63
sublinear wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> The follow up arguments will be that since billion dollar companies ultimately only care about their bottom line, so should we. so it should be fought by giving them free work in the hopes that they'll finally feel guilty and then start paying proper bounties? like to me that just seems funny, as if they'd change anything if we'd keep rewarding them for not doing the right thing like, there's a reason regulation ex…

But don't forget there are also regulations so the regularly scheduled atrocities can keep happening!

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

#198

Post by SaucyWrong »

samus wrote: post #159
SaucyWrong wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that they don’t seem to explicitly state this fact but do go to lengths to explain how the agent didn’t do anything malicious while confirming how alive the token was makes me doubt they asked for permission to run the agent in the first place.

That's highly unlikely since it's standard practice in the industry, thus it's unnecessary to state it. Also, they didn't hack a hobby developer's website, but a prospective business partner who has enough money to sue them into oblivion. No way this wasn't announced. Announcing that their agent restrained itself even though it got hold of a live token is necessary to convince prospective clients. You don't want a pe…

> since it's standard practice in the industry, thus it's unnecessary to state it.

I suppose so, but with a few words it would have been totally unambiguous though. "So... we pointed Strix at .baseten.co and let it run without credentials or source code (with Baseten's prior authorization, of course)*."

We're in the know about this industry convention, but Strix's prospects may not be.

> You don't want a pentester that doesn't show this kind of reserve!

Agreed! A long while back a prospective acquirer set their red team on the B2B I worked at during due-diligence (with our knowledge). I'm ashamed to say that due to a swiss-cheese-type failure in a very obscure endpoint they eventually gained broad access and exfiltrated our tenant DB. We detected this, and patched the problem, locking them out. The game was well and truly over for us at that point, and we took the loss, but they proceeded to attempt to crack customer credentials to re-infiltrate, causing an emergency that we were then bound to notify all of our customers about--they were damaging the goods! All they had to do was show us a tenant slug list and we would have known the scope of the breach, no further penetration was necessary. The acquisition did eventually go through. Though a highly capable red team they were, I haven't worked with one so reckless since then.

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

#199

Post by jacquesm »

hmokiguess wrote: post #24
thrownaway22 wrote: post #17

Baseten carries the Soc 2 Type II and HIPAA Compliant logos on its front page. They also have logos for customers including: OpenEvidence (medical related, used by almost 2/3 of physicians in the US, claim HIPAA compliance), Harvey (legal related, claim "binding terms on data protection, data access, incident response SLAs, and other controls aligned with SOC2, ISO, GDPR and other standards.") From TFA: > That token…

Given the build is from 2023 one would expect that at least the token would have been rotated, and I suspect some of these compliance checks do require rotation of tokens/passwords. That said, the whole compliance industry is a joke.

I tried to open a conversation with an entity that issues ISO27001 certificates about the stuff I had found at a company they had recently certified. The response was such that I have lost faith in that entire industry. It's essentially a well dressed up pay-to-play.

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

#200

Post by jacquesm »

gz09 wrote: post #139
mschuster91 wrote: post #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'v…

> A human, you can hold accountable, and you can keep them at a good security posture with short-lived session tokens. You can do this too (and better) with a repo: OIDC/Workload identity trust relationship between github and aws for short lived tokens + a github environment setup that requires manual approval. Bonus: It also gives you an audit trail with a github action log as opposed to a sysadmin running something…

The moment you upload your private code to GitHub you've already breached your own security perimeter.
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