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Nepenthes is a tarpit to catch AI web crawlers

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Re: Nepenthes is a tarpit to catch AI web crawlers

#201

Post by dspillett »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #141
dspillett wrote: post #62

Tarpits to slow down the crawling may stop them crawling your entire site, but they'll not care unless a great many sites do this. Your site will be assigned a thread or two at most and the rest of the crawling machine resources will be off scanning other sites. There will be timeouts to stop a particular site even keeping a couple of cheap threads busy for long. And anything like this may get you delisted from searc…

Can you put some topic in tarpit that you don't want LLMs to learn about? Say put bunch of info about competitor so that it learns to avoid it?

Unlikely. If the process abandons your site because it takes too long to get any data, it'll not associate the data it did get with the failure, just your site. The information about your competitor it did manage to read before giving up will still go in the training pile, and even if it doesn't the process would likely pick up the same information from elsewhere too.

The only affect tar-pitting might have is to reduce the chance of information unique to your site getting into the training pool, and that stops if other sites quote chunks of your work (much like avoiding github because you don't want your f/oss code going into their training models has no effect if someone else forks your work and pushes their variant to github).

Re: Nepenthes is a tarpit to catch AI web crawlers

#203

Post by Havoc »

What blows my mind is that this is functionally a solved problem.

The big search crawlers have been around for years & manage to mostly avoid nuking sites into oblivion. Then AI gang shows up - supposedly smartest guys around - and suddenly we're re-inventing the wheel on crawling and causing carnage in the process.

Re: Nepenthes is a tarpit to catch AI web crawlers

#204

Post by jeroenhd »

Havoc wrote: post #203

What blows my mind is that this is functionally a solved problem. The big search crawlers have been around for years & manage to mostly avoid nuking sites into oblivion. Then AI gang shows up - supposedly smartest guys around - and suddenly we're re-inventing the wheel on crawling and causing carnage in the process.

Search crawlers have the goal of directing people towards the websites they crawl. They have a symbiotic relationship, so they put in (some) effort not to blow websites out of the water with their crawling, because a website that's offline is useless for your search index.

AI crawlers don't care about directing people towards websites. They intend to replace websites, and are only interested in copying whatever information is on them. They are greedy crawlers that would only benefit from knocking a website offline after they're done, because then the competition can't crawl the same website.

The goals are different, so the crawlers behave differently, and websites need to deal with them differently. In my opinion the best approach is to ban any crawler that's not directly attached to a search engine through robots.txt, and to use offensive techniques to take out sites that ignore your preferences. Anything from randomly generated text to straight up ZIP bombs is fair game when it comes to malicious crawlers.

Re: Nepenthes is a tarpit to catch AI web crawlers

#205

Post by huac »

from an AI research perspective -- it's pretty straightforward to mitigate this attack

1. perplexity filtering - small LLM looks at how in-distribution the data is to the LLM's distribution. if it's too high (gibberish like this) or too low (likely already LLM generated at low temperature or already memorized), toss it out.

2. models can learn to prioritize/deprioritize data just based on the domain name of where it came from. essentially they can learn 'wikipedia good, your random website bad' without any other explicit labels. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05405 and also another recent paper that I don't recall...

Re: Nepenthes is a tarpit to catch AI web crawlers

#206

Post by BoredPositron »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #200
permo-w wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why try this hard for a private company that doesn't employ you?

I always wonder why people not working or planning to work in infosec do this. I get giving up your free time to build open source functionality used by rich for-profit companies that will just make them rich because that's the nature of open source. But literally giving your free time to help a rich company get richer that I do not get. My only explanation is that they enjoy the process. It's like people spending th…

You are on hackernews. It’s curiosity not only about the flaw in their system but also how they as a system react to the flaw. Tells you a lot about companies you can later avoid when recruiters knock or you send out resumes.

Re: Nepenthes is a tarpit to catch AI web crawlers

#207

Post by [deleted] »

huac wrote: post #205

from an AI research perspective -- it's pretty straightforward to mitigate this attack 1. perplexity filtering - small LLM looks at how in-distribution the data is to the LLM's distribution. if it's too high (gibberish like this) or too low (likely already LLM generated at low temperature or already memorized), toss it out. 2. models can learn to prioritize/deprioritize data just based on the domain name of where it…

[deleted]

Re: Nepenthes is a tarpit to catch AI web crawlers

#208

Post by netdevphoenix »

BoredPositron wrote: post #206
netdevphoenix wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder why people not working or planning to work in infosec do this. I get giving up your free time to build open source functionality used by rich for-profit companies that will just make them rich because that's the nature of open source. But literally giving your free time to help a rich company get richer that I do not get. My only explanation is that they enjoy the process. It's like people spending th…

You are on hackernews. It’s curiosity not only about the flaw in their system but also how they as a system react to the flaw. Tells you a lot about companies you can later avoid when recruiters knock or you send out resumes.

I know I am on HN. Curiosity is one thing, investigating issues for free for a rich company is another. The former makes sense to me. The latter not as much, when we live in a world with all sorts of problems that are available to be solved.

I think judging the future state of a company based on its present state is not really fair or reliable especially as the period between the two states gets wider. Culture change (see Google), CxOs leave (OpenAI) and the board changes over time.

Re: Nepenthes is a tarpit to catch AI web crawlers

#209

Post by phoronixrly »

huac wrote: post #205

from an AI research perspective -- it's pretty straightforward to mitigate this attack 1. perplexity filtering - small LLM looks at how in-distribution the data is to the LLM's distribution. if it's too high (gibberish like this) or too low (likely already LLM generated at low temperature or already memorized), toss it out. 2. models can learn to prioritize/deprioritize data just based on the domain name of where it…

So not only do I waste their crawling resource but they may deprioritise/block my site from further crawling? Where do I sign up?

Re: Nepenthes is a tarpit to catch AI web crawlers

#210

Post by SSLy »

griomnib wrote: post #166
marc wrote: post #78

OpenAI doesn’t take security seriously. I reported a vulnerability to them that allowed you to get IP addresses of their paying customers. OpenAI responded “Not applicable” indicating they don’t think it was a serious issue. The PoC was very easy to understand and simple to replicate. Edit: I guess I might as well disclose it here since they don’t consider it an issue. They were/are(?) hot linking logo images of thir…

What do they take seriously?

lobbying to get their business model protected
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