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Comment by 827a | Hacker News Reader

Yeah its tremendously unclear how they can even recover from this. I think the most selective would be: they have to at minimum remove the Generative Language API grant from every API key that was created before it was released. But even that isn't a full fix, because there's definitely keys that were created after that API was released which accidentally got it. They might have to just blanket remove the Generative Language API grant from every API key ever issued.

This is going to break so many applications. No wonder they don't want to admit this is a problem. This is, like, whole-number percentage of Gemini traffic, level of fuck-up.

Jesus, and the keys leak cached context and Gemini uploads. This might be the worst security vulnerability Google has ever pushed to prod.

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The Gemini API is not enabled by default, it has to be explicitly enabled for each project.

The problem here is that people create an API key for use X, then enable Gemini on the same project to do something else, not realizing that the old key now allows access to Gemini as well.

Takeaway: GCP projects are free and provide strong security boundaries, so use them liberally and never reuse them for anything public-facing.

Imagine enabling Maps, deploying it on your website, and then enabling Google Drive API and that key immediately providing the ability to store or read files. It didn't work like that for any other service, why should it work that way for Gemini.

Also, for APIs with quotas you have to be careful not to use multiple GCP projects for a single logical application, since those quotas are tracked per application, not per account. It is definitely not Google's intent that you should have one GCP project per service within a single logical application.

Really? I make multiple GCP projects per app. One project for the (eg) Maps API, one for Drive, one for Mail, one for $THING. Internal corp-services might have one project with a few APIs enabled - but for the client-app that we sell, there are many projects with one or two APIs enabled only.

If you ever have to enable public OAuth on such a project, you'll need to provide a list of all the API projects in use with the application, and Google Trust and Safety will pressure you to merge them together into a single GCP project. I've been through it.

You can do what you're describing but it's not the model Google is expecting you to use, and you shouldn't have to do that.

It seems what happened here is that some extremely overzealous PM, probably fueled by Google's insane push to maximize Gemini's usage, decided that the Gemini API on GCP should be default enabled to make it easier for people to deploy, either being unaware or intentionally overlooking the obvious security implications of doing so. It's a huge mistake.

> decided that the Gemini API on GCP should be default enabled to make it easier for people to deploy

Like deciding ATM cabinets should be default open to make it easier for people to withdraw cash.

No, there must be more behind this than overzealotry.

On the other hand, i would not attribute to malice what could be reasonably attributed to stupidity.

Why would they encourage more resource use, increasing their cost?

Gemini should have had it's own API key separate from their traditionally public facing API IDs (which they call keys) and API keys should default to being tightly scoped to their use case rather than being unrestricted.

Who cares if you have three API keys for three services.

Quite frankly putting any API information in things like url params or client side code just doesn't sit right with me. It breaks the norm in a way that could be, and is now security concern.

> It didn't work like that for any other service, why should it work that way for Gemini.

Artifical Intelligence service design and lack of human intelligence are highly correlated. Who'd have guessed??

I’m usually client side dev, and am an ex googler and very curious how this happened.

I can somewhat follow this line of thinking, it’s pretty intentional and clear what you’re doing when you flip on APIs in the Google cloud site.

But I can’t wrap my mind around what is an API key. All the Google cloud stuff I’ve done the last couple years involves a lot of security stuff and permissions (namely, using Gemini, of all things. The irony…).

Somewhat infamously, there’s a separate Gemini API specifically to get the easy API key based experience. I don’t understand how the concept of an easy API key leaked into Google Cloud, especially if it is coupled to Gemini access. Why not use that to make the easy dev experience? This must be some sort of overlooked fuckup. You’d either ship this and API keys for Gemini, or neither. Doing it and not using it for an easier dev experience is a head scratcher.

They started off behind, and have been scrambling to catch up. This means they didn't get the extra year of design-doc hell before shipping, so mistakes were made.

I was trying to test the gemini-cli using code assist standard.

To this day I am unable to access the models they say I should be able to.

I still get 2.5 only, despite enabling previews in the google cloud config etc etc.

The access seems to randomly turn on and off and swaps depending on the auth used (Oauth, api-key, etc)

The entire gemini-cli repo looks like it is full of slop with 1000 devs trying to be the first to pump every issue into claude and claim some sort of clout.

It is an absolute shit show and not a good a look.

they auto-create projects and api keys: gen-lang-client-12345

app-scripts creates projects as well but maps just generates api keys in the current project

--- Get Started on Google Maps Platform You're all set to develop! Here's the API key you would need for your implementation. API key can be referenced in the Credentials section.

Isn't there a limit to the number of projects you can make and then you have to ask support to increase it?

There is, yes. The rumor mill suggests that the default limit is 30.

At $DAYJOB, we had a (not very special) special arrangement with GCP, and I never heard of anyone who was unable to create a project in our company's orgs [0].

Given how Google never, ever wants to have a human do customer support, I expect a robot will quickly auto-approve requests for "number of projects" quota increases. I know that's how it worked at work.

[0] ...with the exception of errors caused by GCP flakiness and other malfunction, of course.

Many products using the Cloud APIs auto-create projects. I know of AI Studio and Google Script (including scripts embedded in Docs, Sheets, etc)

So many organizations have the IAM "Project creator" role assigned to everyone at the org level. I think it's even a default.

Can vouch, I put in a request for 20 projects extra which was approved in hours.

As long as you are over a certain spend. I started something for my own project and went to apply the recommended architecture, which does not work without a quota increase. As it was from a fresh account, the email was we won't look at this until you spend or pre spend so much money. Frankly, for a trail period when evaluating at prior enterprises, that would have made me just say no to their cloud. One expects that the recommended architecture can be deployed in the trial run without hoops.

I was exploring this today and just clicked on the "maps" Platform or APIs & Services to just explore and it immediately popped up a screen with "This is your API key for maps to start using!" without my input.

It sent me to a url: https://console.cloud.google.com/google/maps-apis/onboard;fl...

which auto-generated an API key for me to paste into things ASAP.

---

Get Started on Google Maps Platform You're all set to develop! Here's the API key you would need for your implementation. API key can be referenced in the Credentials section.

Everytime someone proposes protobuf as an rpc format, I respond “Hell no! There’s no support for protocol versioning.”

Of course, I bring this up because they could just version their API keys, completely solving this problem and preventing future ones like it.

Versioning data formats is wrongthink over there, so I’m guessing they just… won’t.

Does JSON have support for protocol versioning?

Yep: JSON schema Alternatively, with typescript you can write:

export type FooRpcV1 : { version: 1, ... } export type FooRpcV2 : { version: 2, ... }

in zod syntax, and it'll do the right thing statically and at runtime (ask an LLM for help with the syntax).

With protobufs (specifically protoc), you get some type like:

export type FooRpc : { version : 1 | 2, v1fieldA? : string, v1fieldB? : int, v2fieldB? : string, v2fieldB? string };

which is 2^5 message types, even if all fields of both versions were mandatory. Then application logic needs to validate it.

I started replying with a clever approach to layer scopes onto keys… but nope. Doesn’t work.

How did this get past any kind of security review at all? It’s like using usernames as passwords.

Maliciously thinking allowing this increase billable. Thus it increases the bottom line and make stock go up... Which is good for vesting...

Sheesh. We're in a world where a global Big Tech security team lacks comptetance to run even one high-street locksmith.

I hope Google has a database with the creation timestamp for every API key they issued.

I think Google has a database with everything. EVERYTHING.

If there's one thing Google is good at, it's logging.

You can see the creation date even on the GCloud dashboard. But this information isn't helpful in recovering from this issue, if they're interested in recovering correctly, because there's no guarantee that even keys created before the launch of Gemini didn't have Gemini access added to the keys intentionally. There are also likely public keys created after the launch of Gemini that also erroneously received the Gemini grant. The key creation date is ultimately useless; what it comes down to is whether the key's usage is intentional or malicious, which is impossible for Google to determine without involving the customer.

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