[HN Gopher] SAPwned: SAP AI vulnerabilities expose customers' cl...
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       SAPwned: SAP AI vulnerabilities expose customers' cloud
       environments and privat
        
       Author : todsacerdoti
       Score  : 232 points
       Date   : 2024-07-17 22:02 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.wiz.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.wiz.io)
        
       | mvandermeulen wrote:
       | Excellent write up. This wasn't a sophisticated attack. Seems
       | like there is very little discipline at Salesforce when it comes
       | to deploying production systems.
        
         | phoe18 wrote:
         | How is this related to Salesforce?
        
           | bloqs wrote:
           | Salesforce, SAP, it's all the same sort of
        
             | btown wrote:
             | This is like saying Apple and Alphabet are the same. SAP is
             | a 52 year old company and is the largest non-American
             | software company in revenue, and has never been part of
             | Salesforce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP
        
               | f1shy wrote:
               | They do software?
        
               | friscas wrote:
               | SAP is a software company, its the direct competitor of
               | Oracle.
        
               | f1shy wrote:
               | LOL!!!
        
       | cosmotic wrote:
       | As security researchers, you think they might have known that
       | pixelating text to redact it is a poor choice.
       | 
       | https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researcher-re...
        
         | NotMichaelBay wrote:
         | It looks to me like it was blurred, not pixelated.
         | 
         | Edit: Nvm, I guess they blurred text in some places, pixelated
         | in others
        
           | FrostKiwi wrote:
           | In both cases, yes and there are multiple projects able to
           | reverse it for both the pixelation case [1]
           | 
           | Blurring is like a hashing algorithm. If you know the font,
           | size and placement that was used, you can try out reblurring
           | and Thus brute forcing characters
           | 
           | [1] https://github.com/spipm/Depix
        
             | TeMPOraL wrote:
             | In case of blurring, wouldn't it be easier to try and guess
             | the parameters of blur operation used, and invert it?
        
               | Filligree wrote:
               | Depending on the specific type of blurring that may be
               | impossible, but if you can do it, sure.
        
         | chatmasta wrote:
         | The reported bugs have all been patched, and presumably the
         | compromised secrets have been rotated. The blurring/pixelation
         | is arguably unnecessary, regardless of its effectiveness. The
         | censored data looks like local host names and some image
         | hashes.
        
       | dotty- wrote:
       | I hope SAP does a hard retrospective on why Wiz's research was
       | not disrupted before they got full cluster admin. Like, I want to
       | know from SAP's side whether they received any alerts for any of
       | this activity and whether they investigated them properly. I
       | wonder if there is any regulation SAP has to follow that requires
       | them to have adequate alerting for suspicious network activity
       | and whether this research can be used to show that they do not.
        
         | SoftTalker wrote:
         | Indeed. And if they did not detect it, how can they know that
         | customer data have not been compromised?
        
         | uaas wrote:
         | Usually security researchers are required to reach out to the
         | target before escalating further into the systems, asking for
         | permissions to proceed. This is also something bug bounty
         | programs require as per their rules for their targets in scope.
         | I'd expect this to be the case here as well, given the
         | researcher is employed by a security company.
         | 
         | Researchers also usually mention which points they asked for
         | additional permissions at in writeups, but now always.
        
         | Propelloni wrote:
         | Oh, they have rules and regulations, for sure. Take a look at
         | their certification page: https://www.sap.com/about/trust-
         | center/certification-complia...
         | 
         | Question is, do they live it or is it just some binder sitting
         | on a shelf.
        
           | BodyCulture wrote:
           | The problem is that people who do decisions don't understand
           | the technology. Most IT managers in Germany do not even know
           | how programming works. There are exceptions, but the biggest
           | players are people flying in blindsight.
        
         | j45 wrote:
         | It would be a great post to see how they detect such things in
         | AI.
        
       | mac-chaffee wrote:
       | Shocked that there was a tiller instance running. That's been
       | deprecated since 2020: https://helm.sh/blog/helm-v2-deprecation-
       | timeline/
        
         | uaas wrote:
         | You would be horrified if you would know how much pre-'20s or
         | even pre-'10s software is still running in production out
         | there. Here we are talking about a huge enterprise and a
         | somewhat complex migration (from tiller) but you can easily
         | find outdated software without these aggravating circumstances
         | as well.
        
           | hunter2_ wrote:
           | Software from 2019 is horrifyingly outdated? If updates with
           | security patches exist but haven't been applied, sure, but
           | that's not really a default scenario depending on the stack.
        
             | uaas wrote:
             | I've only used 2020 because of the example in question.
             | Security patches might or might not have been applied in
             | both my imaginary example and in real world.
        
         | ketzu wrote:
         | In my experience, "deprecated" is often taken as "we can still
         | use that, it is not removed yet", which I find somewhat
         | disheartening sometimes.
        
           | c0balt wrote:
           | That's easy though, the removed part can also be ingored by
           | mirroring package repositories for RHEL/ Debian-based
           | systems.
        
       | 1oooqooq wrote:
       | the sad part is that all this is going to accomplish is promote
       | that sap has ai product their clients can purchase. it's not like
       | anyone using sap know or care about security other than signing
       | with a company that has all the ISO and whatnot, which is the
       | reason they went with sap to begin with
        
         | j45 wrote:
         | I would assume for the prices SAP charges, it mah start as some
         | kind of bulletin of how to properly secure the AI, and failing
         | that a feature update to tighten some defaults.
         | 
         | But a security fist to a leaky side door? I'd bet that upsets
         | some customers.
         | 
         | Many of these accounting systems are starting to sell AI to
         | automate transactions, which may explain the read+write nature
         | of the access described in the comments.
        
       | betaby wrote:
       | Am I reading it correctly, customer's account data is exposed to
       | the same customer? The exception is some logs as I see.
        
         | waterproof wrote:
         | Some logs... and some other customers' training data and
         | code... and SAP's internal docker image repository (with read-
         | write access!)
        
           | betaby wrote:
           | You are right! I missed that all NFS folders on the
           | screenshot have rwxr-xr-x permissions.
        
       | jaaron wrote:
       | While I get that it's the AI product, the vulnerability here is
       | the k8s configuration. It really has nothing to do with the AI
       | product itself or AI training or anything related to machine
       | learning or generative AI, it's more about poor cloud computing
       | platform security.
        
         | bilekas wrote:
         | The article doesn't say that it is an issue with the product
         | itself though. It explains very well than infact it's the
         | isolation of the AI training models.
         | 
         | > The root cause of these issues was the ability for attackers
         | to run malicious AI models and training procedures, which are
         | essentially code
         | 
         | It's being researched and investigated, to my understanding,
         | due to the prevalence of AI products and the need to be mindful
         | of the infrastructure.
        
         | j45 wrote:
         | The brand that sells is the brand at fault.
         | 
         | Securing it or knowing to secure it or testing it or never
         | releasing it until it was secure is all things that are with
         | the brand making the sale.
        
         | cchance wrote:
         | Which is possibly worse lol, the fact SAP a company as big as
         | they are with as much critical information as they have,
         | fucking up basic cloud security, they didn't even fuck up
         | something new they fucked up common shit from the sound of it.
        
           | sunaookami wrote:
           | The bigger the company the less they care since no one will
           | hold them accountable anyways.
        
       | ec109685 wrote:
       | This is really bad. They are running a single K8s cluster and
       | expecting hard multi-tenancy guarantees?
       | 
       | All the major clouds use vm boundaries and separate K8s clusters
       | between customers. Microsoft was similarly bitten a few years ago
       | with one of their function products that expected K8s to be the
       | primary security boundary.
        
         | bilekas wrote:
         | > They are running a single K8s cluster and expecting hard
         | multi-tenancy guarantees?
         | 
         | Maybe I missed something in the article but where are they
         | expecting any hard guarantees. If there is a model being
         | trained for example (running arbitrary code) where does a multi
         | K8 tenency play?
         | 
         | The main issue I see is all internal network communication was
         | trusted once behind the proxy/firewall (Istio) but I probably
         | just don't understand k8 clusters too well.
        
           | robertlagrant wrote:
           | Istio is point to point between services. It's not a boundary
           | in the sense you're thinking.
        
             | bilekas wrote:
             | I will admit I don't know a lot about Kubernets at all, but
             | as I see the Istio is supposed to be the proxy layer
             | between services ?
             | 
             | https://istio.io/latest/docs/ops/deployment/architecture/
             | 
             | Being able to run as the Istio user (1337) renders the
             | proxy itself moot right ?
        
               | gbrayut wrote:
               | There are a lot of other ways to bypass the Istio sidecar
               | proxy, which is not designed to be a general egress
               | boundary/firewall. See
               | https://blog.howardjohn.info/posts/bypass-egress/
        
         | Arbortheus wrote:
         | K8S done right is literally designed for multi tenancy. A
         | separate cluster per customer would be insanely costly and
         | terrible for the planet. Maybe in premium products where
         | security is paramount, but a separate cluster per customer is
         | basically setting your money on fire.
        
           | blincoln wrote:
           | Multi-tenant Kubernetes[1] is a strcpy-level footgun IMO.
           | It's perfectly fine as long as everyone involved does
           | everything correctly and never makes a mistake.
           | 
           | Kubernetes itself is very complex. The "who needs a UI when
           | you have configuration files and an API?" approach makes it
           | even more opaque to the people who often end up responsible
           | for it. The landscape changes very rapidly.[2] I'd trust
           | Kelsey Hightower to set up a secure multi-tenant deployment,
           | but probably not anyone else.
           | 
           | Is it not practical to deploy clusters on top of
           | virtualization? That should make efficient use of hardware
           | while still giving each tenant their own cluster, therefore
           | providing stronger isolation than the typical Kubernetes
           | configuration tends to.
           | 
           | [1] I am specifically referring to a Kubernetes deployment
           | where different customers are running custom code on the same
           | underlying hosts. Using Kubernetes to host a service that is
           | multi-tenant at a higher level is not something I would
           | recommend, but it's not as immediately dangerous as a model
           | where customers run container-level custom code.
           | 
           | [2] This is not surprising for a relatively new technology,
           | especially one that's as paradigm-shifting as Kubernetes was.
           | But most people are not going to rearchitect and redeploy
           | everything every six months just because the Kubernetes
           | developers decided to replace a pod security or network
           | security model with a non-backward-compatible alternative
           | _again_.
        
           | outworlder wrote:
           | > K8S done right is literally designed for multi tenancy
           | 
           | No it is not. Not in the way they are using it.
           | 
           | There are two main use-cases. One is multiple teams, in which
           | case they are bound by their company's policies and
           | guardrails
           | 
           | The second is multiple customers. But that also assumes they
           | have no direct access to the cluster. A vendor would,
           | instead, deploy multiple instances of a workload; the
           | _customers_ would not.
           | 
           | Straight from the horse's mouth:
           | https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/security/multi-tenancy/
           | 
           | There's also nothing that says that multiple clusters need to
           | be expensive, if they are sized right. They can be as small
           | as you need both in number of instances and instance size.
           | The overhead here is the control plane but, for small
           | clusters, the resource requirements are similarly small.
           | 
           | That said, if hard multi tenancy is what you need, then you
           | need to use things like this: https://github.com/kubernetes-
           | sigs/cluster-api-provider-nest...
           | 
           | (for the control plane - you still need to worry about the
           | data plane)
        
         | outworlder wrote:
         | Hard multi tenancy can't realistically be achieved in the same
         | logical K8s cluster. And it is a moving target, which makes
         | trying to secure it by admission controllers... not a great
         | plan.
         | 
         | One needs to look into things like VirtualClusters to even
         | begin to consider hard multi-tenancy with potential hostile
         | tenants(https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api-
         | provider-nest...). That is just about the control plane. It
         | doesn't even touch the data plane.
         | 
         | How secure that is even with the extra layer, I do not know.
         | Even in the VM land we have seen crazy VM escape exploits over
         | the years.T
        
       | tiffanyh wrote:
       | Has anyone used Wiz?
       | 
       | It's possibly the fastest rocket for an enterprise software
       | company ever.
       | 
       | $100M in just 1.5 years time
       | 
       | $350M at end of 3-year
       | 
       | https://www.wiz.io/blog/100m-arr-in-18-months-wiz-becomes-th...
        
         | rtev wrote:
         | About to be acquired by Google for $23 billion as well!
        
           | nicce wrote:
           | So... the road for maximizing the profits will begin?
        
         | kchr wrote:
         | Using it and loving it. Security aspects aside, it's also the
         | best tool I've tried for proper asset management in multi-cloud
         | scenarios. With the graph feature you can write queries for
         | basically anything, across all accounts if you wish.
        
       | tetha wrote:
       | This makes me glad I finally talked people at work into running
       | our annual pentests of our products on production, and putting
       | the entire production infrastructure in scope. Focus may be on a
       | specific product or system, but everything is in scope.
       | 
       | And the first test is running, and no one is screaming yet, so
       | fingers crossed.
        
         | DyslexicAtheist wrote:
         | when you say yearly I assume you're not conducting regular
         | internal pentests?
         | 
         | any pentesting companies that you could recommend which do more
         | than just drive-by shooting with metasploit?
        
       | darefalcon wrote:
       | Companies that penetrate networks uninvited looking for
       | vulnerabilities to create blog content should be prosecuted IMHO.
       | This piece in particular sounds like a hit piece thinly vailed as
       | a vulnerability disclosure.
       | 
       | "We thanked them for their co-operation". Sounds kinda like
       | extortion.
        
         | ppbjj wrote:
         | Are you serious?
        
         | _dain_ wrote:
         | way to shoot the messenger.
        
         | dumpsterdiver wrote:
         | > Companies that penetrate networks uninvited looking for
         | vulnerabilities to create blog content should be prosecuted
         | IMHO.
         | 
         | Your comment could be rephrased as, "Companies who carelessly
         | collect and store sensitive user data insecurely should not be
         | closely scrutinized, and should be left alone to continue
         | exposing innocent user data to malicious cyber criminals."
         | 
         | Looks a lot different when you look at it from that angle,
         | right?
        
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       (page generated 2024-07-18 23:06 UTC)