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Signal leaders warn agentic AI is an insecure, unreliable surveillance risk

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Re: Signal leaders warn agentic AI is an insecure, unreliable surveillance risk

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want the AI to do anything useful, you need to be able to trust it with the access to useful things. Sandboxing doesn't solve this. By default, AI cannot be trusted because it is not deterministic. You can't audit what the output of any given prompt is going to be to make sure its not going to rm -rf / We need some form of behavioral verification/auditing with guarantees that any input is proven to not produ…

Determinism is an absolute red herring. A correct output can be expressed in an infinite amount of ways, all of them valid. You can always make an LLM give deterministic outputs (with some overhead), that might bring you limited reproducibility, but that won't bring you correctness. You need correctness, not determinism. >We need some form of behavioral verification/auditing with guarantees that any input is proven t…

This comment I'm making is mostly useless nitpicking, and I overall agree with your point. Now I will commence my nitpicking:

I suspect that it may merely be infeasible, not strictly impossible. There has been work on automatically proving that an ANN satisfies certain properties (iirc e.g. some kinds of robustness to some kinds of adversarial inputs, for handling images).

It might be possible (though infeasible) to have an effective LLM along with a proof that e.g. it won't do anything irreversible when interacting with the operating system (given some formal specification of how the operating system behaves).

But, yeah, in practice I think you are correct.

It makes more sense to put the LLM+harness in an environment which ensures you can undo whatever it does if it messes things up, than to try to make the LLM be such that it certainly won't produce outputs that would mess things up in a way that isn't easily revertible, even if it does turn out that the latter is in principle possible.

Re: Signal leaders warn agentic AI is an insecure, unreliable surveillance risk

#62
post #56
post #51

Recall itself is absolutely ridiculous. And any solution like it is as well. Meanwhile, Anthropic is openly pushing the ability to ingest our entire professional lives into their model which ChatGPT would happily consume as well (they're scraping up our healthcare data now). Sandboxing is the big buzzword early 2026. I think we need to press harder for verified privacy at inference. Any data of mine or my company's g…

>Any data of mine or my company's going over the wire to these models needs to stay verifiably private. I don't think this is possible without running everyting locally and the data not leaving the machine (or possibly local network) you control.

Without diving too technically here there is an additional domain of “verifiability” relevant to ai these days.

Using cryptographic primitives and hardware root of trust (even GPU trusted execution which NVIDIA now supports for nvlink) you can basically attest to certain compute operations. Of which might be confidential inference.

My company, EQTY Lab, and others like Edgeless Systems or Tinfoil are working hard in this space.

Re: Signal leaders warn agentic AI is an insecure, unreliable surveillance risk

#64
post #25

This isn't an AI problem, its an operating systems problem. AI is just so much less trustworthy than software written and read by humans, that it is exposing the problem for all to see. Process isolation hasn't been taken seriously because UNIX didn't do a good job, and Microsoft didn't either. Well designed security models don't sell computers/operating systems, apparently. That's not to say that the solution is unk…

It’s also an AI problem, because in the end we want what is called “computer use” from AI, and functionality like Recall. That’s an important part of what the CCC talk was about. The proposed solution to that is more granular, UAC-like permissions. IMO that’s not universally practical, similar to current UAC. How we can make AIs our personal assistants across our digital life — the AI effectively becoming an operatin…

> in the end we want what is called “computer use” from AI

Who is "we" here? I do not want that at all.

Re: Signal leaders warn agentic AI is an insecure, unreliable surveillance risk

#65
post #56
post #51

Recall itself is absolutely ridiculous. And any solution like it is as well. Meanwhile, Anthropic is openly pushing the ability to ingest our entire professional lives into their model which ChatGPT would happily consume as well (they're scraping up our healthcare data now). Sandboxing is the big buzzword early 2026. I think we need to press harder for verified privacy at inference. Any data of mine or my company's g…

>Any data of mine or my company's going over the wire to these models needs to stay verifiably private. I don't think this is possible without running everyting locally and the data not leaving the machine (or possibly local network) you control.

Interestingly enough, it is possible to do private inference in theory, e.g. via oblivious inference protocols but prohibitively slow in practice. You can also throw a model into a trusted execution environment. But again, too slow.

Re: Signal leaders warn agentic AI is an insecure, unreliable surveillance risk

#66
post #51

Recall itself is absolutely ridiculous. And any solution like it is as well. Meanwhile, Anthropic is openly pushing the ability to ingest our entire professional lives into their model which ChatGPT would happily consume as well (they're scraping up our healthcare data now). Sandboxing is the big buzzword early 2026. I think we need to press harder for verified privacy at inference. Any data of mine or my company's g…

> And any solution like it is as well.

Depends. I think I would like it to have an observing AI which is only active when I want it to, so that it logs the work done, but isn't a running process when I don't want to, which would be the default.

But that should certainly not be bundled with the OS and best even a portable app, so no registry entries, no files outside of its directory (or a user-provided data directory)

Let's say you're about to troubleshoot an important machine and have several terminals and applications open, it would be good to have something that logs all the things done with timestamped image sequences.

The idea of Recall is good, but we can't trust Microsoft.

Re: Signal leaders warn agentic AI is an insecure, unreliable surveillance risk

#67
post #54
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting take, but it sounds like you're downplaying the actual risks of enterprise users running agents on their desktop(?). What would your say would be a prudent posture an IT manager should take to control risk to the organisation?

Anybody who has ever run an internal pentest knows there's dozens of different ways to game-over an entire enterprise, and decisively resolving all of them in any organization running at scale is intractable. That's why it's called risk management, and not risk eradication.

Risk management is not my day job, but I'm aware of a cottage industry of enterprise services and appliances to map out, prevent and mitigate risks. Pentest are part of those as are keeping up with trends and literature.

So on the subject of something like Recall or Copilot what tools and policies does an it manager have at their disposal to prevent let's say unintentional data exfiltration or data poisoning?

(Added later:) How do I make those less likely to happen?

Re: Signal leaders warn agentic AI is an insecure, unreliable surveillance risk

#68

This isn't an AI problem, its an operating systems problem. AI is just so much less trustworthy than software written and read by humans, that it is exposing the problem for all to see. Process isolation hasn't been taken seriously because UNIX didn't do a good job, and Microsoft didn't either. Well designed security models don't sell computers/operating systems, apparently. That's not to say that the solution is unk…

If you want the AI to do anything useful, you need to be able to trust it with the access to useful things. Sandboxing doesn't solve this. Full isolation hasn't been taken seriously because it's expensive, both in resources and complexity. Same reason why microkernels lost to monolithic ones back in the day, and why very few people use Qubes as a daily driver. Even if you're ready to pay the cost, you still need to d…

Crazy how all the rules about privacy and security go out of the window as soon as its AI

Re: Signal leaders warn agentic AI is an insecure, unreliable surveillance risk

#69
post #65
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Any data of mine or my company's going over the wire to these models needs to stay verifiably private. I don't think this is possible without running everyting locally and the data not leaving the machine (or possibly local network) you control.

Interestingly enough, it is possible to do private inference in theory, e.g. via oblivious inference protocols but prohibitively slow in practice. You can also throw a model into a trusted execution environment. But again, too slow.

Modern TEE is actually performant for industry needs these days. Over 400,000x gains of zero knowledge proofs and with nominal differences from most raw inference workloads.
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