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Comment by RadiozRadioz | Hacker News Reader

Well, yes. You don't find something if you don't look. The LLMs did the looking before the humans did, so they found the vulnerabilities.

It's definitely worthwhile to point out that LLMs have changed the economics of looking; we can now look in far more places far more quickly than we could before. But the above points were that the vulnerability itself happened to be an easy one that didn't intrinsically require an LLM.

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Isn't the issue here that they used something like Artifactory for this purpose in the first place? It is not intended as a robust and secure packet manager for sandboxes. Why would any human look for vulnerabilities in Artifactory at all? So the scenario never arose where a human was incentivizied to scrutinize Artifactory, something that was never needed because it was never intended for the purpose of being a packet manager in a secure sandbox.

Means the problem lies elsewhere: deciding to use it at all. That points again towards the lack of basic SysAdmin skills.

> the lack of basic SysAdmin skills

If we exclude those who lack "basic" level skills, what solution would most typically be used by someone who has "basic" level skills for this use case? And what solution for someone with "expert" (or medium) level skills?

Don’t let software inside the sandbox access the internet on request. Have a package repository with approved software the agents might want, and push to it over a channel that is ingress only. I can imagine ways of breaking out of this, and come up with a lot more to mitigate, but this would be fairly basic stuff that’d be vastly superior.

> ingress only

The issue we're discussing happened while running ExploitGym. Doesn't the ExploitGym arXiv test explicitly have external "outbound" network requests as allowed for package installation and supporting toolchain installation?

Part of the toolchain had full internet access. Agents had access to Artifactory, Artifactory could do whatever it wanted. So even locking that down to certain external sites would have stopped this particular attack.

Well the most obvious thing would be to gate access to artifactory behind tools. E.g. apt get install is a tool and only the tool gets access to artifactory.

Right, that’s basically what I’m saying. There’s not zero use for an attack like this, but it’s not a likely situation.

Said another way: if Artifactory was somehow a common gatekeeper between grounded techy teenagers and their access to internet porn, this would have been found ages ago.

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