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N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

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Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#81
IMHO, N8n isn't great if you care about security.

It's not that the tool itself is inherently insecure - it's more about how users are encouraged to use it.

Nearly all workflows built using N8n that I've seen face some kind of prompt injection vulnerability. This is primarily because, in most cases, you configure the LLM by directly inserting external data into the system prompt. As many of you know, the system prompt has the highest execution priority, meaning instructions placed there can heavily influence how the LLM interacts with its tools.

While this isn't exploitable in every situation, it can often be exploited rather generically: by embedding prompts in your social media bio, website, or other locations from where these workflows pull data. Recently, I've managed to use this technique to prompt a random LinkedIn bot to email me back a list of their functions. That's not overly exciting in itself, but it clearly demonstrates the potential for malicious use.

This issue is not specific to N8n. Other tools do it too. But it seems to me there is little to no awareness that this is in fact a problem.

There is a better, safer way to incorporate external data into LLM prompts without jumping through hoops, but unfortunately, that's not how things are currently done with N8n, at least as of today.

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#82
post #81

IMHO, N8n isn't great if you care about security. It's not that the tool itself is inherently insecure - it's more about how users are encouraged to use it. Nearly all workflows built using N8n that I've seen face some kind of prompt injection vulnerability. This is primarily because, in most cases, you configure the LLM by directly inserting external data into the system prompt. As many of you know, the system promp…

What's the safe alternative?

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#83

n8n has been good but not great in our organization (and we pronounce it "Nathan", to answer someone else's question). It's effectively a self-hosted version of Zapier and has quite a few built-in integrations. It's a bit more annoying to use than Zapier (but the price is right), and the AI features are currently about like the AI features of every other product: basically sufficient to tell investors "we do AI!" but…

n8n and Windmill are two very different tools.

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#84
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. It's dual licensed. Most of the features are available in the self hosted / local version.

It's dual licensed in a way, but neither license is open source. The OSI messed up in not coming up with an answer to the SSPL, and now ambitious projects that would have traditionally gone with an open source license like AGPL are now foregoing open source entirely and just slapping a sustainable use license on it. So yeah, you can use n8n for free, but that doesn't make it open source. It is a source available lice…

What's the catch?

You have to pay after some revenue threshold?

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#85
Can someone recommend a self-host alternative for n8n? I'd be fine paying for one of the lower tiers to get access to shared workspaces, so I can work with my small team, but if you want to self-host you have to jump up to the Enterprise version which can easily be 20x more expensive.

This makes it unusable for my purpose.

But in my (limited) research into options like Airflow or Dagster or Windmill, they weren't quite at the same level and it doesn't feel like a significant value-add over writing a simple webhook server.

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#86

Can someone recommend a self-host alternative for n8n? I'd be fine paying for one of the lower tiers to get access to shared workspaces, so I can work with my small team, but if you want to self-host you have to jump up to the Enterprise version which can easily be 20x more expensive. This makes it unusable for my purpose. But in my (limited) research into options like Airflow or Dagster or Windmill, they weren't qui…

Where do you think the gap between Airflow and what you need is?

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#87
post #81

IMHO, N8n isn't great if you care about security. It's not that the tool itself is inherently insecure - it's more about how users are encouraged to use it. Nearly all workflows built using N8n that I've seen face some kind of prompt injection vulnerability. This is primarily because, in most cases, you configure the LLM by directly inserting external data into the system prompt. As many of you know, the system promp…

What's the safe alternative?

As somebody working in AI Security: There isn't one currently. If you're feeding untrusted inputs into an LLM (today), you have to treat the entire prompt as radioactive.

That means: - Limit the potential for a malicious prompt to do anything bad - Scope permissions to the lowest level you can

There are some other mitigations (moderation APIs using a 2nd LLM), but in general they're not 100% solutions. You really need to design your systems around accepting this limitation today.

More info on this wiki here: https://github.com/tldrsec/prompt-injection-defenses

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#88
post #81

IMHO, N8n isn't great if you care about security. It's not that the tool itself is inherently insecure - it's more about how users are encouraged to use it. Nearly all workflows built using N8n that I've seen face some kind of prompt injection vulnerability. This is primarily because, in most cases, you configure the LLM by directly inserting external data into the system prompt. As many of you know, the system promp…

What's the safe alternative?

Maybe you can:

A- Limit the capabilities of users. B- Help users limit the capabilities that they to their sub-users, whether they be per-program capabilities or per dependency capabilities.

I think B is the path forward, if you give a user access to emails and files and ChatGPT, then he can give ChatGPT access to emails and files and do damage that way.

With B you can give the user access to ChatGPT and email and a file system, but help him configure fine grained permissions for their experiments.

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#90
post #8

If you’re looking for an Open Source alternative, give Windmill a try.

Windmill is also not fully open source; there are major sections of it powering central features that are not released as free software.

Also, they require a CLA with copyright assignment so they can reuse your contributions in nonfree software. It’s always shady when companies do this.

The open source parts of Windmill are partially Apache and partially AGPL; there are some of us who additionally regard the AGPL as nonfree (because it’s really a EULA).

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