I used to use iTerm2. I had no idea it was doing all of this behind my back. That’s not what I want my terminal to do!
"cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
31–40 of 197 posts
Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
#32This 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 w…
Well all these bugs (iTerm2’s, prompt injection, SQL injection, XSS) are one class of mistake — you sent out-of-band data in the same stream as the in-band data.
If we can get that to raise a red flag with people (and agents), people won’t be trying to put control instructions alongside user content (without considering safeguards) as much.
Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
#33This 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 w…
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Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Wrong argument, since it's not just available to "the CIA" but every rando under the sun, people should be notified immediately if "tracking" them is possible and mitigation measures should become a common standard practice
Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
#35This 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 w…
I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
#36Back in the PDP-10 days, one communicated with it using a terminal attached to it. One of my fellow students discovered that if you hit backspace enough times, the terminal handler would keep erasing characters before the buffer. Go far enough, and then there was an escape character (Ctrl-u?) that would delete the whole line.
Poof went the operating system!
Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
#37This 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 w…
i think part of the problem is the archaic interface that is needed to enable feature rich terminal apps. what we really want is a modern terminal API that does not rely on in-band command sequences. that is we want terminals that can be programmed like a GUI, but still run in a simple (remote) terminal like before.
Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
#38This 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 w…
i think part of the problem is the archaic interface that is needed to enable feature rich terminal apps. what we really want is a modern terminal API that does not rely on in-band command sequences. that is we want terminals that can be programmed like a GUI, but still run in a simple (remote) terminal like before.
plan9 and 9term solved this decades ago, right?
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/OnTerminal...
Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
i think part of the problem is the archaic interface that is needed to enable feature rich terminal apps. what we really want is a modern terminal API that does not rely on in-band command sequences. that is we want terminals that can be programmed like a GUI, but still run in a simple (remote) terminal like before.
plan9 and 9term solved this decades ago, right? https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/OnTerminal...
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Re: "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
#40This 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 w…
IIRC you used to be able to exploit xterm using malformed escape codes for setting the window title.