Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandeepkd | Hacker News Reader

Agreed its a tool, and it does not looks like any vulnerability was exploited on their end. However part of the blog is confusing to me. Long lived keys vs short lived have their own space in discussion, there are use cases, pros & and cons for the same. However it is not very clear how a short lived credential would have prevented the exploit in this case?

View on HN

I read it as I should add new nodes with short lived keys and avoid long lived ones.

Yes, this doesn’t solve the issue, but also adds one more step to the chain.

The AI didn’t crack the encryption or managed to get arbitrary access. And also Tailscale makes things easier to manage than simple VPNs and firewall rules. But it still requires a decent amount of attention and careful configuration to make a perfect system.

It would not have prevented the initial exploit. The agent gained access to the K8s cluster and read the Tailscale Auth Key from Cluster Secrets. A short-lived credential would reduce the risk that the key is still valid when an agent gains access.

Thats the point, the short lived credentials would have done much other than adding more step of getting the secrets again which is why I am questioning the discussion of that in a root cause analysis itself. Adding one more layer does not increases the security by default in every case.

A short-lived credential would reduce the risk that the key is still valid when an agent gains access

How does that work? If the agent is reading the credential from the live configuration, how short does the lifespan of a key need to be to prevent it from being used by an unauthorized process?

Long enough to authenticate the node into the Tailnet. Short enough to revoke itself before the Agent can use it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com