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How we rooted Copilot

research.eye.security

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Re: How we rooted Copilot

#21

Post by citizenpaul »

bramhaag wrote: post #4

> We reported the vulnerability to Microsoft in April and they have since fixed it as a moderate severity vulnerability. As only important and critical vulnerabilities qualify for a bounty award, we did not receive anything, except for an acknowledgement on the Security Researcher Acknowledgments for Microsoft Online Services webpage. I guess it makes sense that a poor little indie company like Microsoft can't pay bu…

I'll never understand why people do free dev work for multinational trillion dollar conglomerates.

Re: How we rooted Copilot

#22

Post by pamelafox »

simonw wrote: post #8

OK, I think I understand what this is about: the vulnerability that they reported (and Microsoft fixed) is that there was a trick you could use to run your own code with root privileges inside the container - when the system was designed to have you only execute code as a non-root user. It turned out not to really matter, because the container itself was still secured - you couldn't make network requests from it and…

I don’t know specifically how this container was implemented, but Microsoft has a standard way to do isolated Python sandboxes: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/container-apps/sessi... Hopefully this feature is using that or something similar.

Re: How we rooted Copilot

#23

Post by VBprogrammer »

simonw wrote: post #18
ajross wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the modern world vulnerabilities are stacks. Asserting that "the container itself was still secured" is just a statement that the attackers didn't find anything there. But container breakouts and VM breakouts are known things. All it takes is a few mistakes in configuration or a bug in a virtio driver or whatever. This is a real and notable result.

If they had found and reported a container breakout I expect they would've got a bug bounty from it! Are there any known unfixed container breakouts at the moment in the kind of systems Microsoft are likely to be using here?

Presumably someone with mal-intent would sit on the root vulnerability waiting for a container breakout bug to come around.

Re: How we rooted Copilot

#24

Post by apwell23 »

citizenpaul wrote: post #21
bramhaag wrote: post #4

> We reported the vulnerability to Microsoft in April and they have since fixed it as a moderate severity vulnerability. As only important and critical vulnerabilities qualify for a bounty award, we did not receive anything, except for an acknowledgement on the Security Researcher Acknowledgments for Microsoft Online Services webpage. I guess it makes sense that a poor little indie company like Microsoft can't pay bu…

I'll never understand why people do free dev work for multinational trillion dollar conglomerates.

i don't think they did the work for them. they just reported it to them.

Re: How we rooted Copilot

#25

Post by DSMan195276 »

simonw wrote: post #18
ajross wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the modern world vulnerabilities are stacks. Asserting that "the container itself was still secured" is just a statement that the attackers didn't find anything there. But container breakouts and VM breakouts are known things. All it takes is a few mistakes in configuration or a bug in a virtio driver or whatever. This is a real and notable result.

If they had found and reported a container breakout I expect they would've got a bug bounty from it! Are there any known unfixed container breakouts at the moment in the kind of systems Microsoft are likely to be using here?

The problem is that you're encouraging people to keep stuff like this to themselves until they can use it to perform an exploit that they'd get paid for, which is the opposite of what Microsoft wants - they'd much rather you report it now so that if an exploit does get found that requires root they would potentially be protected.

The simple question for Microsoft to answer is - does it matter to them if attackers have root access on the container? If the answer is yes then the bug bounty for root access should at least pay something to encourage reporting. If the answer is no then this shouldn't have been marked as a vulnerability because root access is not considered a security issue.

Re: How we rooted Copilot

#26

Post by thfuran »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #23
simonw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they had found and reported a container breakout I expect they would've got a bug bounty from it! Are there any known unfixed container breakouts at the moment in the kind of systems Microsoft are likely to be using here?

Presumably someone with mal-intent would sit on the root vulnerability waiting for a container breakout bug to come around.

But a $5 wrench isn't a critical security vulnerability just because someone somewhere might one day find the right person to apply it to to extract important credentials.

Re: How we rooted Copilot

#27

Post by hombre_fatal »

citizenpaul wrote: post #21
bramhaag wrote: post #4

> We reported the vulnerability to Microsoft in April and they have since fixed it as a moderate severity vulnerability. As only important and critical vulnerabilities qualify for a bounty award, we did not receive anything, except for an acknowledgement on the Security Researcher Acknowledgments for Microsoft Online Services webpage. I guess it makes sense that a poor little indie company like Microsoft can't pay bu…

I'll never understand why people do free dev work for multinational trillion dollar conglomerates.

Could say the same thing about open source software.

Re: How we rooted Copilot

#28

Post by amelius »

n2d4 wrote: post #10
bramhaag wrote: post #4

> We reported the vulnerability to Microsoft in April and they have since fixed it as a moderate severity vulnerability. As only important and critical vulnerabilities qualify for a bounty award, we did not receive anything, except for an acknowledgement on the Security Researcher Acknowledgments for Microsoft Online Services webpage. I guess it makes sense that a poor little indie company like Microsoft can't pay bu…

The important part: > Now what have we gained with root access to the container? > Absolutely nothing! > We can now use this access to explore parts of the container that were previously inaccessible to us. We explored the filesystem, but there were no files in /root, no interesting logging to find, and a container breakout looked out of the question as every possible known breakout had been patched. I'm sure there a…

Maybe this was their honeypot container.

Re: How we rooted Copilot

#29

Post by VBprogrammer »

thfuran wrote: post #26
VBprogrammer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably someone with mal-intent would sit on the root vulnerability waiting for a container breakout bug to come around.

But a $5 wrench isn't a critical security vulnerability just because someone somewhere might one day find the right person to apply it to to extract important credentials.

A container root exploit isn't a critical security vulnerability either, describing it as moderate seems fair, but it's a reasonable step towards one.

Re: How we rooted Copilot

#30

Post by hayleox »

It's wild how easy this was. I feel like we're really in the wild west era of security with these AI tools -- reminds me of early Web 2.0 days, like when "samy is my hero" hit and Myspace didn't even have a security team. I anticipate many high-profile incidents before they figure out how to tame this beast.
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