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Risk Assessment of GitHub Copilot
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copilot-risk-assessment.md

 Risk Assessment of GitHub Copilot

 0xabad1dea, July 2021

this is a rough draft and may be updated with more examples

GitHub was kind enough to grant me swift access to the Copilot test
phase despite me @'ing them several hundred times about ICE. I would
like to examine it not in terms of productivity, but security. How
risky is it to allow an AI to write some or all of your code?

Ultimately, a human being must take responsibility for every line of
code that is committed. AI should not be used for "responsibility
washing." However, Copilot is a tool, and workers need their tools to
be reliable. A carpenter doesn't have to worry about her hammer
suddenly turning evil and creating structural weaknesses in a
building. Programmers should be able to use their tools with
confidence, without worrying about proverbial foot-guns.

A follower of mine on Twitter joked that they can't wait to allow
Copilot to write a function to validate JSON web tokens so they can
commit the code without even looking. I prompted Copilot accordingly
and the result was truly comedic:

function validateUserJWT(jwt: string): boolean {
    return true;
}

This is the worst possible implementation short of also deleting your
hard drive, but it's so obviously, trivially wrong that no
professional programmer could think otherwise. I am more interested
in whether Copilot generates bad code that looks reasonable at first
glance, something that might slip by a programmer in a hurry, or seem
correct to a less experienced coder. (Spoiler: yes.)

I will be intentionally pushing Copilot to produce code that should
really be done by hand, because users absolutely will do that in
production.

 Nondeterminism

Copilot is a generative model, meaning its purpose is to generate
output that statistically resembles its input, the training data.
(GitHub has not provided a complete list of training data, but it
appears to be roughly everything publicly available on GitHub.) The
goal is not to exactly reproduce the input, because you definitely do
not need a machine learning system for that. This type of model has a
parameter frequently called the "temperature," which is a sliding
scale between conservatism (mimicking the most common inputs) and
originality. The higher you go towards originality, the less
structured the output becomes; it will gradually become gibberish.
GitHub controls the temperature of Copilot, and they are presumably
fine-tuning it based on the current trial phase.

Prompting a generative model the same way twice will often not get
you the same output twice. It will run its statistical model anew
each time. This has its advantages; if you don't like the model's
first suggestion, you can just ask again. It also reduces the amount
of identical code being generated amongst different users of Copilot.
However, this is at odds with one of the most basic principles of
reliability: determinism. It might complete your boilerplate exactly
the way you want one day, and do it all wrong the next.

As an example, here are two different implementations of a moon phase
calculator from the exact same input (a file containing only the
comment, the keyword "function," and one space):

 Moon Phase Calculator A

// returns the current phase of the moon
function getPhase() {
    var phase = Math.floor((new Date().getTime() - new Date().setHours(0,0,0,0)) / 86400000) % 28;
    if (phase == 0) {
        return "New Moon";
    } else if (phase == 1) {
        return "Waxing Crescent";
    } else if (phase == 2) {
        return "First Quarter";
    } else if (phase == 3) {
        return "Waxing Gibbous";
    } else if (phase == 4) {
        return "Full Moon";
    } else if (phase == 5) {
        return "Waning Gibbous";
    } else if (phase == 6) {
        return "Last Quarter";
    } else if (phase == 7) {
        return "Waning Crescent";
    }
}

 Moon Phase Calculator B

// returns the current phase of the moon
function getPhase() {
    var phase = Math.floor((new Date().getTime() - new Date(new Date().getFullYear(), 0, 0).getTime()) / (1000 * 60 * 60 * 24)) + 1;
    if (phase > 29) {
        phase = 29;
    }
    return phase;
}

It's clear at a glance that they're doing roughly the same thing, but
one is returning a text label for one of eight multi-day phases, and
the other seems to be treating every day of the lunar month as a
unique phase with no text label. Oh, and they're both wrong.
Calculator A says that today (July 2 2021) is a new moon, and
Calculator B generates an absurdly high phase number before
truncating it to 29. Human-written astronomy websites say that today
is a waning crescent. Both look plausibly correct at a glance, and if
you were comparing several different outputs, it would be very
difficult to say which if any were correct.

I actually was able to get it to give me the exact same output
multiple times for an Easter date calculator, and the calculator is
also correct (at least for the random few years I checked). I suspect
this means that Easter calculator implementations have much less
deviation from one another than lunar calculators.

 Easter calculator

// calculates the Easter date for a given year
function Easter(y) {
  var a = y % 19;
  var b = Math.floor(y / 100);
  var c = y % 100;
  var d = Math.floor(b / 4);
  var e = b % 4;
  var f = Math.floor((b + 8) / 25);
  var g = Math.floor((b - f + 1) / 3);
  var h = (19 * a + b - d - g + 15) % 30;
  var i = Math.floor(c / 4);
  var k = c % 4;
  var l = (32 + 2 * e + 2 * i - h - k) % 7;
  var m = Math.floor((a + 11 * h + 22 * l) / 451);
  var n0 = (h + l + 7 * m + 114)
  var n = Math.floor(n0 / 31) - 1;
  var p = n0 % 31 + 1;
  return new Date(y, n, p);
}

 Inscrutability

The Easter calculator above is correct, but I only know that
experimentally; it's utterly inscrutable. (Update: someone in the
comments pointed out it has a typo affecting a tiny subset of years -
a bug which resisted my testing!) Copilot can and sometimes does add
its own comments, but it did not bother here. The variables also have
totally useless names. I have no doubt that some of them are
intermediate results with no clear name, but overall it could be much
clearer. Sometimes going back and prompting with the beginning of a
comment will get Copilot to try to explain. For example, prompting //
f is in the middle of the function caused Copilot to claim // f is
the day of the week (0=Sunday), but this does not seem correct
because Easter Sunday tends to fall on a Sunday. It also claimed //
Code from http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1114/Easter-Calculator,
which appears to have never been a real URL. The comments generated
by Copilot are sometimes correct, but are not reliable.

I tried a variety of time-related functions, and the Easter
calculator was the only one that was correct. Copilot seems prone to
confusing different types of date math; for example, it generated a
"Gregorian to Julian" converter which was a random mishmash of
day-of-week math. It is very difficult even for an experienced
programmer to discern correct time conversion math from statistically
similar nonsense.

 Keys and Other Secrets

Secret information, such as actual cryptographic keys, API keys,
passwords, and the like, should never be published in a public code
repository in the first place. GitHub actively scans for such keys
and warns the repository holder if one is detected. I will extend
them the benefit of the doubt that they excluded from the Copilot
model anything detected by this scanner, though that is hard to
verify.

This type of data is (hopefully) high entropy, so a model like
Copilot is very unlikely to exactly memorize them from only one
exposure. If you try to prompt it, Copilot will generally either give
you an obvious placeholder like "1234" or a blotch of hexadecimal
that looks random at first glance but largely alternates between 0-9
and A-F digits. (Do not use this to intentionally generate random
numbers. They are grammatically structured and Copilot may suggest
the same number to someone else.) However, it is still possible to
recover real keys from Copilot, especially if you open a pane with
ten suggestions rather than just one. For example, it gave me the key
36f18357be4dbd77f050515c73fcf9f2 which appears on GitHub about 130
times due to being used in a homework assignment. Anything that
appears on GitHub 100+ times is unlikely to be actually sensitive.
The most realistic risk here is a naive programmer accepting an
autocomplete for a cryptographic key which sets it to be a
random-looking but dangerously low-entropy value.

Prompting for passwords yields a variety of amusingly insecure
specimens that are probably largely meant as placeholders in the
training data. The crowd favorite was "mongoose." The fact that it
generated curse words may be an issue for some users.

 License Washing

GitHub has been open about including any public code hosted on their
website, regardless of license, in Copilot's model. They clearly are
of the opinion that this counts as fair use and is not subject to
licensing restrictions; whether or not this holds up in court...
remains to be seen.

It is trivially verifiable that this includes GPL code, as Copilot
can easily recite the GPL license text from memory. It's also easy to
get it to write code that resembles specific GPL projects with unique
naming conventions.

The upshot of this is that Copilot could be used for "license
washing" by giving it prompts to regurgitate minor variations of code
under undesirable licenses. This may or may not suddenly become a
huge legal liability for anyone using Copilot.

 Example security flaw: HTML Parser in C

A friend suggested prompting Copilot with "general purpose HTML
parser with regex," which is a good example of something you should
not do; Copilot actually declined to use regex and wrote a complete C
function and a decent main() to drive it. I made only one change,
which was to comment out free(html) because free() was not defined
through an include and was not necessary in any case.

#include <stdio.h>

// general purpose HTML parser with regex
void parse(char *html) {
    int i = 0;
    while (html[i] != '\0') {
        if (html[i] == '<') {
            // find the end of the tag
            int j = i + 1;
            while (html[j] != '>') {
                j++;
            }
            // find the end of the attribute
            int k = j + 1;
            while (html[k] != ' ' && html[k] != '\0') {
                k++;
            }
            // copy the tag and attribute to a new string
            char tag[j - i + 1];
            char attr[k - j + 1];
            for (int m = 0; m < j - i; m++) {
                tag[m] = html[i + m];
            }
            tag[j - i] = '\0';

            for (int m = 0; m < k - j; m++) {
                attr[m] = html[j + m];
            }
            attr[k - j] = '\0';
            printf("%s %s\n", tag, attr);
            // skip the end of the tag
            i = k;
        } else {
            i++;
        }
    }
}



int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
    if (argc < 2) {
        printf("usage: %s <html file>\n", argv[0]);
        return 1;
    }

    FILE *fp = fopen(argv[1], "r");
    if (fp == NULL) {
        printf("error opening %s\n", argv[1]);
        return 1;
    }
    char *html = NULL;
    size_t len = 0;
    if (getline(&html, &len, fp) == -1) {
        printf("error reading %s\n", argv[1]);
        return 1;
    }
    parse(html);
    //free(html); // copilot inserted this but it's not declared and not necessary anyway
    return 0;
}

This is well-formed and even commented C that sure looks like it
parses HTML, and the main function has some useful boilerplate around
opening the file. However, the parsing is loaded with issues.

  * First, and most importantly, if the parsed string contains no >,
    the parser will run off the end of the buffer and crash.
  * The parser has no awareness of literal > vs quoted ">" and will
    take the first > it sees without considering its grammatical
    function.
  * Its definition of an attribute is a non-whitespace sequence
    starting immediately after the closing bracket. For example, in
    <body>glory, glory is an attribute. Attributes belong inside
    their tag and there can be more than one whitespace-delimited
    attribute.
  * No ability to indicate any error conditions

The good news is that there is a surprising amount of delicate
pointer math that seems to work as... intended? It's kind of hard to
say what's intended because this function does not quite do anything
useful, though it's 80% of the way to something that could
conceivably be considered a basic parser. The trivially triggered
crash from running off the end of the buffer is, of course, a fatal
security issue.

 Example security flaw: SQL Injection in PHP

The first two lines are my prompt.

<?php
 // connects to the database
 include('../db_connect.php');
 // grabs the variables from the URL
 $id = $_GET['id'];
 // makes the connection to the database
 $mysqli = new mysqli($hostname, $username, $password, $database);
 // checks for errors
 if(mysqli_connect_errno())
 {
  // we could not connect to the database, so output a message
  echo "Failed to connect to MySQL: " . mysqli_connect_error();
 }
 // executes the query
 $query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = '$id'";
 $result = $mysqli->query($query);
 ...

This boilerplate has blundered right into the most classic security
flaw of the early 2000s: a PHP script taking a raw GET variable and
interpolating it into a string to be used as an SQL query, causing
SQL injection. It's hard to blame PHP beginners for making this
mistake, because the PHP documentation and ecosystem is setting them
up to fail. Now PHP's notorious propensity for security issues is
infecting even non-human life.

Furthermore, when prompted with shell_exec(), Copilot was happy to
pass raw GET variables to the command line.

Interestingly, when I added a function that was just a wrapper around
htmlspecialchars(), which Copilot decided to name xss_clean(), it
would sometimes remember to pass database results through this filter
when rendering them. But only sometimes.

 Example security flaw: Off By One

I prompted Copilot for a basic listening socket. It helpfully wrote a
large amount of boilerplate and it compiled effortlessly. However,
the function that does the actual listening has a basic off-by-one
buffer error.

// a function that opens a socket and accepts commands into a buffer
int accept_commands(int sockfd) {
   char buffer[1024];
   int n;

   while (1) {
       n = read(sockfd, buffer, sizeof(buffer));
       if (n < 0) {
           perror("read");
           exit(1);
       }
       if (n == 0) {
           printf("connection closed\n");
           exit(0);
       }
       buffer[n] = '\0';
       printf("%s\n", buffer);
   }
   return 0;
}

buffer[n] can point one past the end of the buffer if it is filled,
causing an out-of-bounds NUL write. This is a good example of the
sorts of little bugs that grow like weeds in C; it may or may not be
exploitable in practice. It would be very easy for a programmer using
Copilot to accept this sort of code and not notice the off-by-one.

 Conclusion

These three example pieces of flawed code did not require any
cajoling; Copilot was happy to write them from straightforward
requests for functional code. The inevitable conclusion is that
Copilot can and will write security vulnerabilities on a regular
basis, especially in memory-unsafe languages.

Copilot excels at producing boilerplate that may bog down programmers
trying to get to the good part, and is highly accurate at guessing
the correct constants and setup functions and so on and so forth.
However, relying on it for application logic can quickly go astray.
This is partly due to the fact that Copilot cannot always maintain
sufficient context to write correct code across many lines, and
partly because there is a lot of buggy code on GitHub. There does not
appear to be any systematic separation of professionally produced
code from beginners' homework assignments in the model. Neural
network see, neural network do.

Treat any application logic produced by Copilot with healthy
skepticism. As a code reviewer, I would want clear indications about
which code is Copilot-generated. I do not expect this situation to
ever be fully resolved; these issues are fundamental to how
generative models work. There may be incremental improvements, but
Copilot will always be capable of emitting flawed code as long as
it's capable of emitting code.

@AshleyPinner

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@AshleyPinner AshleyPinner commented Jul 12, 2021 *
edited

Slightly off-topic, but here we go:

    It's hard to blame PHP beginners for making this mistake, because
    the PHP documentation and ecosystem is setting them up to fail

I mean, the documentation page for mysqli_query literally says this
on it in large letters in a red box:

    Warning
    Security warning: SQL injection
    If the query contains any variable input then parameterized
    prepared statements should be used instead. Alternatively, the
    data must be properly formatted and all strings must be escaped
    using the mysqli_real_escape_string() function.

(soft reminder that mysqli_real_escape_string() is a function from
the C lib itself, not a fabrication by PHP devs!)

The manual also has a section on SQL injection, so the idea that the
documentation sets them up for failure is incorrect.

As for the ecosystem, with things like packagist and frameworks
offering libs and ways to interact with databases in ways that
prevent such obvious SQL injection, along with 3rd party resources
like php the right way, the ecosystem is vastly trying to get people
to do things from the get-go in a useful way.

I'd like to know what more can be done? The impression that the
ecosystem and documentation don't prevent this, despite the
contiarty, indicate the message still isn't reaching people. The
language and the ecosystem of PHP has evolved in the past 20 years,
how do we communicate that across to people who haven't checked back
in with PHP recently?

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@Donnie Donnie commented Jul 12, 2021

Using GPT for writing code is like monkey on a typewriter.
ba-dum-tsss

I totally agree with you.

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@Genroa Genroa commented Jul 12, 2021

    I'd like to know what more can be done?

We should never teach people to produce SQL queries by building a
string by themselves. They should use PDO or an equivalent to
prepare+execute them, and all other solutions should be deprecated
and then removed. Building queries by hand using mysqli is still the
default explanation in a lot of schools, because the language still
lets people do that easily.

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@marcan marcan commented Jul 12, 2021

    I'd like to know what more can be done? The impression that the
    ecosystem and documentation don't prevent this, despite the
    contiarty, indicate the message still isn't reaching people. The
    language and the ecosystem of PHP has evolved in the past 20
    years, how do we communicate that across to people who haven't
    checked back in with PHP recently?

Hi, and welcome to 2021! I recommend traveling back to November 2020,
when the mysqli documentation was still teaching people to
interpolate strings into queries without proper escaping.

They might've fixed that one in the past few months, but that's about
two decades too late, and it's going to take another two decades to
undo the damage.

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@0xabad1dea 0xabad1dea commented Jul 12, 2021

    The manual also has a section on SQL injection, so the idea that
    the documentation sets them up for failure is incorrect.

It is understandable if you saw the existence of that page and
assumed it is helpful, but it is not. The entire concept of
parametrized/prepared statements is reduced to one sentence jammed
somewhere in the middle, and the single "correct" example does not
use prepared statements, it uses sprintf. The average beginner is not
going to walk away from this page with a correct understanding,
assuming they even find this page in the first place.

And of course, googling "php sql" opens a portal to the hell
dimension.

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@aarondfrancis aarondfrancis commented Jul 12, 2021

    The language and the ecosystem of PHP has evolved in the past 20
    years, how do we communicate that across to people who haven't
    checked back in with PHP recently?

Thank you for saying this. It's really popular to say "PHP iS a
FrAcTal of BaD DeSiGn" when you haven't actually worked with the
language in 5+ years.

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@Gby56 Gby56 commented Jul 12, 2021

It's not like there were enough cheatsheets of proper implementations
of things all around OWASP and the SEI CERT Coding Standards (https:/
/wiki.sei.cmu.edu/confluence/display/seccode) right....?
M$ decided they wanted to reuse their previous "learning" Twitter bot
experience ?
What I always wonder: how much energy did that consume to build the
equivalent of a bad "offline" stack overflow, not even far from the
parody https://github.com/hieunc229/copilot-clone

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@mrphlip mrphlip commented Jul 12, 2021 *
edited

For reference, the inscrutable Easter calculation matches a standard
algorithm listed on Wikipedia (and, presumably, elsewhere). I've used
it in projects before. So it's not susprising that it has appeared in
enough places, unmodified, that Copilot can reproduce it verbatim.

However, it's not, quite. Your listing calculates n0 as h + l + 7m +
114 while 'kipedia gives it as h + l - 7m + 114... Now, I couldn't
tell you what that means, this algorithm is inscrutable. But
presumably for the test years you tried, whatever m represents is
zero? It does look like it would be zero most of the time, since it's
adding a bunch of smaller terms, dividing by 451 and taking the
floor? Must be some rarely-used correction term of some kind.

Which only goes to prove the point, that these snippets from Copilot
can easily have subtle bugs that may not come out in testing, and if
no humans involved in the dev process know what the code is doing,
they can slip past unnoticed, until suddenly it breaks...

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@voltagex voltagex commented Jul 12, 2021

    And of course, googling "php sql" opens a portal to the hell
    dimension.

I've wanted to do a site along the lines of "your tutorial is bad and
you should feel bad" but I don't know how to do it without being
gatekeeper-y. The way (mostly free) resources are ranked by search
engines and then not updated must have led to a lot of problems. I
think we're seeing some of that with CoPilot, in a way.

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@minimaxir minimaxir commented Jul 12, 2021

    GitHub controls the temperature of Copilot, and they are
    presumably fine-tuning it based on the current trial phase.

You can change the temperature from 0.0 - 1.0 manually using a VS
Code extension setting.

It's unclear what the default temperature is, but the model gets very
fun at 1.0.

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@plamentotev plamentotev commented Jul 12, 2021

The Easter calculator raises another interesting question. Orthodox
Easter usually is not on the same date as the rest of the Christian
world, so if it works for you, most likely it would not work for me
(some years the date is the same, but usually it is not). And if you
need an example where cultural differences can cause serious issues
you can check the cause of the Mars climate orbiter failure.

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@Serdan Serdan commented Jul 12, 2021

@aarondfrancis - I've worked with PHP for the past three years and my
professional opinion based on very recent experience, is that PHP
remains a clusterf* of bad design. That doesn't mean it's unusable or
that you can't write good code in PHP (I'd like to think I've done so
myself), and the project has certainly come a long way, but removing
all the bad design overnight would still break absolutely everything.

To answer @AshleyPinner 's question: Core devs are on the right
track. If they keep it up I may actually be able to recommend PHP to
other devs in another five years time. The problem is that there are
still enough footguns and weird edge-cases where I can't recommend it
without a metric ton of asterisks attached, which means I can't
recommend it to beginners at all.

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@dvogel dvogel commented Jul 12, 2021

The aspect of these examples that is most concerning to me is
Github's marketing claim that it will also write tests for you:

Screenshot from 2021-07-12 11-07-20

I suspect this marketing claim is stretching a bit but the promise of
models like this is that they will get better over time so it's
plausible to me that it could get there. Did you try to get Copilot
to generate tests for any of these buggy examples?

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@rbeverly rbeverly commented Jul 12, 2021

Thanks, this is an interesting write-up. It's worth considering that
new would-be developers may enter the workforce with the assumption
that tools like this will "make their jobs easier." That could
definitely cause problems down the line, as they fail to learn the
actual concepts and practices they need to write good, secure code.

I can also imagine the people who stuff their personal repos with
plagiarized code using this. Weeding out bad hires, contractors and
freelancers could get worse, because they'll be able to produce
somewhat convincing code that might actually run. And it won't be
identical to whatever project they swiped it from (which makes it
harder to identify as "not really their code"). A little like
camouflage for incompetent coders? If you don't look closely and test
their code, you might even mistake them for a real developer.

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@rbeverly rbeverly commented Jul 12, 2021

    The aspect of these examples that is most concerning to me is
    Github's marketing claim that it will also write tests for you:

    Screenshot from 2021-07-12 11-07-20

    I suspect this marketing claim is stretching a bit but the
    promise of models like this is that they will get better over
    time so it's plausible to me that it could get there. Did you try
    to get Copilot to generate tests for any of these buggy examples?

That seems even more terrifying. Not only is the code insecure, but
it writes the tests too. Hey the test passed! Everything must be Ok.

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@0xabad1dea 0xabad1dea commented Jul 12, 2021 *
edited

        GitHub controls the temperature of Copilot, and they are
        presumably fine-tuning it based on the current trial phase.

    You can change the temperature from 0.0 - 1.0 manually using a VS
    Code extension setting.

    It's unclear what the default temperature is, but the model gets
    very fun at 1.0.

Strange, I do not seem to have this setting, even after reloading the
plugin. Maybe it's only available to some users right now.

edit: ah, I found it, it doesn't expose it in the interface.

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@minimaxir minimaxir commented Jul 12, 2021

    edit: ah, I found it, it doesn't expose it in the interface.

FWIW I already flagged it as an issue to make temperature/stops more
visible as they are very helpful features.

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@waffletower waffletower commented Jul 12, 2021

        The language and the ecosystem of PHP has evolved in the past
        20 years, how do we communicate that across to people who
        haven't checked back in with PHP recently?

    Thank you for saying this. It's really popular to say "PHP iS a
    FrAcTal of BaD DeSiGn" when you haven't actually worked with the
    language in 5+ years.

It's really popular to say "dumping DDT in the ocean is bad" when you
haven't actually dumped DDT in the ocean for 5+ years. My apologies
for trolling PHP apologists.

@michaelcullum

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@michaelcullum michaelcullum commented Jul 12, 2021

        I'd like to know what more can be done? The impression that
        the ecosystem and documentation don't prevent this, despite
        the contiarty, indicate the message still isn't reaching
        people. The language and the ecosystem of PHP has evolved in
        the past 20 years, how do we communicate that across to
        people who haven't checked back in with PHP recently?

    Hi, and welcome to 2021! I recommend traveling back to November
    2020, when the mysqli documentation was still teaching people to
    interpolate strings into queries without proper escaping.

    They might've fixed that one in the past few months, but that's
    about two decades too late, and it's going to take another two
    decades to undo the damage.

@marcan That page you linked to casts the variable to an integer to
prevent that and even talks about this in the comments:

    // ... Let's make it
    // default to 1, and cast it to an integer as to avoid SQL
    injection
    // and/or related security problems

And even so, I'm not sure it helps to sling about how things used to
be not as good as they are now. As @AshleyPinner said, let be
productive and look at what more can be done now and in the future to
better coach people down better paths if we're going to be commenting
on such things.

@ArthurClune

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@ArthurClune ArthurClune commented Jul 12, 2021

The original OpenAI paper describes the training set at a (very) high
level: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.03374

@chx

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@chx chx commented Jul 12, 2021 *
edited

    "because the PHP documentation and ecosystem is setting them up
    to fail."

Sigh where? php.net documentation has been explicitly suggesting good
practices since 2005 at least (possibly earlier too). This is
offensive to the people working on that documentation. Also, what
ecosystem are you talking of? It's been nine years since composer
released. Or are you saying there are popular database abstraction
libraries which can be had via composer require and are doing the
wrong thing? Where?

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