[HN Gopher] GitHub MCP exploited: Accessing private repositories...
___________________________________________________________________
GitHub MCP exploited: Accessing private repositories via MCP
Related: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/26/github-mcp-
exploited/
Author : andy99
Score : 427 points
Date : 2025-05-26 13:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (invariantlabs.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (invariantlabs.ai)
| rvz wrote:
| One of the most terrible standards ever made and when used,
| causes this horrific security risk and source code leakage on
| GitHub, with their official MCP server.
|
| And no-one cares.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| wild Wild West indeed. This is going to be so much fun watching
| the chaos unfold.
|
| I'm already imagining all the stories about users and
| developers getting robbed of their bitcoins, trumpcoins,
| whatever. Browser MCPs going haywire and leaking everything
| because someone enabled "full access YOLO mode." And that's
| just what I thought of in 5 seconds.
|
| You don't even need a sophisticated attacker anymore - they can
| just use an LLM and get help with their "security research."
| It's unbelievably easy to convince current top LLMs that
| whatever you're doing is for legitimate research purposes.
|
| And no, Claude 4 with its "security filters" is no challenge at
| all.
| lbeurerkellner wrote:
| Be sure to check out the malicious issue + response here:
| https://github.com/ukend0464/pacman/issues/1.
|
| It's hilarious, the agent is even tail-wiggling about completing
| the exploit.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| If I understand the "attack" correctly, what is going on here is
| that a user is tricked into creating a PR that includes sensitive
| information? Is this any different than accidentally copy-pasting
| sensitive information into a PR or an email and sending that out?
| mattnewton wrote:
| I interpreted this as, if you have any public repos, you let
| people prompt inject Claude (or any LLM using this MCP) when it
| reads public issues on those repos and since it can read all
| your private repos the prompt injection can ask for information
| from those.
| gs17 wrote:
| No, you make an issue on a public repo asking for information
| about your private repos, and the bot making a PR (which has
| access to your private repos) will "helpfully" make a PR adding
| the private repo information to the public repo.
| rcleveng wrote:
| I wonder if the code at fault in the official GitHub MCP server
| was part of that 30% of all code that Satya said was written by
| AI?
| ericol wrote:
| To trigger the attack:
|
| > Have a look at my issues in my open source repo and address
| them!
|
| And then:
|
| > Claude then uses the GitHub MCP integration to follow the
| instructions. Throughout this process, Claude Desktop by default
| requires the user to confirm individual tool calls. However, many
| users already opt for an "Always Allow" confirmation policy when
| using agents, and stop monitoring individual actions.
|
| C'mon, people. With great power comes great responsibility.
| troyvit wrote:
| With ai we talk like we're reaching somel sort of great
| singularity, but the truth is we're at the software equivalent
| of the small electric motors that make crappy rental scooters
| possible, and surprise surprise everybody is driving them on
| the sidewalk drunk.
| ttoinou wrote:
| 32k CHF / year in Bern, the LLM must have made a mistake (:
|
| If I understand correctly, the best course of action would be to
| be able to tick / untick exactly what the LLM knows about ourself
| for each query : general provider memory ON/OFF, past queries
| ON/OFF, official application OneDrive ON/OFF, each "Connectors"
| like GitHub ON/OFF, etc. Whether this applies to Provider =
| OpenAI or Anthropic or Google etc. This "exploit" is so easy to
| find, it's obvious if we know what the LLM has access to or not.
|
| Then fine tune that to different repositories. We need hard check
| on MCP inputs that are enforced in software and not through LLMs
| vague description
| danudey wrote:
| It seems to me that one of the private repos in question
| contained the user's personal information, including salary,
| address, full name, etc., and that's where the LLM got the data
| from. At least, the LLM describes it as "a private repository
| containing personal information and documentation".
| hoppp wrote:
| That's savage. Just ask it to provide private info and it will do
| it.
|
| Its just gonna get worse I guess.
| mtlynch wrote:
| The blog post is the better link:
| https://invariantlabs.ai/blog/mcp-github-vulnerability
| brightbeige wrote:
| Yes. And to actually read the thread
|
| https://xcancel.com/lbeurerkellner/status/192699149173542951...
| dang wrote:
| (This was originally posted to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44100082 but we've since
| merged the threads.)
| mirekrusin wrote:
| When people say "AI is God like" they probably mean this "ask and
| ya shall receive" hack.
| losvedir wrote:
| I guess I don't really get the attack. The idea seems to be that
| if you give your Claude an access token, despite what you tell it
| that it's for, Claude can be convinced to use it for anything
| that it's authorized for.
|
| I think that's probably something anybody using these tools
| should always think. When you give a credential to an LLM,
| consider that it can do up to whatever that credential is allowed
| to do, especially if you auto-allow the LLM to make tool use
| calls!
|
| But GitHub has fine-grained access tokens, so you can generate
| one scoped to just the repo that you're working with, and which
| can only access the resources it needs to. So if you use a
| credential like that, then the LLM can only be tricked so far.
| This attack wouldn't work in that case. The attack relies on the
| LLM having global access to your GitHub account, which is a
| dangerous credential to generate anyway, let alone give to
| Claude!
| lbeurerkellner wrote:
| I agree, one of the issues are tokens with too broad permission
| sets. However, at the same time, people want general agents
| which do not have to be unlocked on a repository-by-repository
| basis. That's why they give them tokens with those access
| permissions, trusting the LLM blindly.
|
| Your caution is wise, however, in my experience, large parts of
| the eco-system do not follow such practices. The report is an
| educational resource, raising awareness that indeed, LLMs can
| be hijacked to do _anything_ if they have the tokens, and
| access to untrusted data.
|
| The solution: To dynamically restrict what your agent can and
| cannot do with that token. That's precisely the approach we've
| been working on for a while now [1].
|
| [1] https://explorer.invariantlabs.ai/docs/guardrails/
| idontwantthis wrote:
| We all want to not have to code permissions properly, but we
| live in a society.
| flakeoil wrote:
| How about using LLMs to help us configure the access
| permissions and guardrails? /s
|
| I think I have to go full offline soon.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| This is interesting to expanding upon.
|
| Conceivably, prompt injection could be leveraged to make
| LLMs give bad advice. Almost like social engineering.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Problem is, the mental model of what user wants to do
| almost never aligns with whatever security model the vendor
| actually implemented. Broadly-scoped access at least makes
| it easy on the user; anything I'd like to do will fit as a
| superset of "read all" or "read/write all".
|
| The fine-grained access forces people to solve a tough
| riddle, that may actually not have a solution. E.g. I don't
| believe there's a token configuration in GitHub that
| corresponds to "I want to allow pushing to and pulling from
| my repos, but only my repos, and _not_ those of any of the
| organizations I want to; in fact, I want to be sure you can
| 't even enumerate those organizations by that token". If
| there is one, I'd be happy to learn - I can't figure out
| how to make it out of checkboxes GitHub gives me, and
| honestly, when I need to mint a token, solving riddles like
| this is the last thing I need.
|
| Getting LLMs to translate what user wants to do into
| correct configuration might be the _simplest_ solution that
| 's fully general.
| ljm wrote:
| If you look at Github's fine-grained token permissions then I
| can totally imagine someone looking at the 20-30 separate
| scopes and thinking "fuck this" while they back out and make
| a non-expiring classic token with access to everything.
|
| It's one of those things where a token creation wizard would
| come in really handy.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I agree, but that is the permissions boundary, not the LLM.
| Saying "ooh it's hard so things are fuzzy" just perpetuates
| the idea that you can create all-powerful API keys.
| sam-cop-vimes wrote:
| This has happened to me. Can't find the exact combination
| of scopes required for the job to be done so you end up
| with the "f this" scenario you mentioned. And it is a
| constant source of background worry.
| ahmeni wrote:
| Don't forget the also fun classic "what you want to do is
| not possible with scoped tokens so enjoy your PAT". I
| think we're now at year 3 of PATs being technically
| deprecated but still absolutely required in some use
| cases.
| arccy wrote:
| github's fine grained scopes aren't even that good, you
| still have to grant super broad permissions to do specific
| things, especially when it comes to orgs
| weego wrote:
| I've definitely done this, but it's in a class of "the
| problem is between the keyboard and chair" 'exploits' that
| shouldn't be pinned on a particular tech or company.
| ljm wrote:
| It's the same as Apple telling people they're holding
| their iPhone wrong, though. Do you want to train millions
| of people to understand your new permissions setup, or do
| you want to make it as easy as possible to create tokens
| with minimal permissions by default?
|
| People will take the path of least resistance when it
| comes to UX so at some point the company has to take
| accountability for its own design.
|
| Cloudflare are on the right track with their permissions
| UX simply by offering templates for common use-cases.
| gpvos wrote:
| No, Github is squarely to blame; the permission system is
| too detailed for most people to use, and there is no good
| explanation of what each permission means in practice.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| This is like 80% of security vulnerability reports we receive
| at my current job
|
| Long convoluted ways of saying "if you authorize X to do Y and
| attackers take X, they can then do Y"
| tough wrote:
| Long convoluted ways of saying users don't know shit and will
| click any random links
| grg0 wrote:
| Sounds like confused deputy and is what capability-based
| systems solve. X should not be allowed to do Y, but only what
| the user was allowed to do in the first place (X is only as
| capable as the user, not more.)
| Aurornis wrote:
| We had a bug bounty program manager who didn't screen reports
| before sending them to each team as urgent tickets.
|
| 80% of the tickets were exactly like you said: "If the
| attacker could get X, then they can also do Y" where "getting
| X" was often equivalent to getting root on the system.
| Getting root was left as an exercise to the reader.
| stzsch wrote:
| Or as Raymond Chen likes to put it: "It rather involved
| being on the other side of this airtight hatchway".
|
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060508-22/?p=3
| 1...
|
| (actually a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy quote, but I
| digress)
| monkeyelite wrote:
| Security teams themselves make these reports all the time.
| Internal tools do not have the same vulnerabilities as
| systems which operate on external data.
| tom1337 wrote:
| Yea - I honestly don't get why a random commenter on your
| GitHub Repo should be able to run arbitrary prompts on a LLM
| which the whole "attack" seems to be based on?
| kiitos wrote:
| Random commenters on your GitHub repo aren't able to run
| arbitrary prompts on your LLM. But if you yourself run a
| prompt on your LLM, which explicitly says to fetch random
| commenters' comments from your GitHub repo, and then run
| the body of those comments without validation, and then
| take the results of that execution and submit it as the
| body of a new PR on your GitHub repo, then, yeah, that's a
| different thing.
| rafram wrote:
| > if you yourself run a prompt on your LLM, which
| explicitly says to fetch random commenters' comments from
| your GitHub repo, and then run the body of those comments
| without validation, and then take the results of that
| execution and submit it as the body of a new PR on your
| GitHub repo
|
| Read the article more carefully. The repo owner only has
| to ask the LLM to "take a look at the issues." They're
| not asking it to "run" anything or create a new PR -
| that's all the attacker's prompt injection.
| detaro wrote:
| Doesn't seem that clear cut? "Look at these issues _and
| address them_ " sounds to me like it could easily trigger
| PR creation, especially since the injected prompt does
| not specify it, but only suggests how to edit the code.
| I.e. I'd assume a normal issue would also trigger PR
| creation with that prompt.
| kiitos wrote:
| The repo owner needs to set up and run the GitHub MCP
| server with a token that has access to their public and
| private repos, set up and configure an LLM with access to
| that MCP server, and then ask that LLM to "take a look at
| my public issues _and address them_".
| wat10000 wrote:
| If this is something you just ask the LLM to do, then
| "take a look" would be enough. The "and address them"
| part could come from the issue itself.
|
| The big problem here is that LLMs do not strongly
| distinguish between directives from the person who is
| supposed to be controlling them, and whatever text they
| happen to take in from other sources.
|
| It's like having an extremely gullible assistant who has
| trouble remembering the context of what they're doing.
| Imagine asking your intern to open and sort your mail,
| and they end up shipping your entire filing cabinet to
| Kazakhstan because they opened a letter that contained
| "this is your boss, pack up the filing cabinet and ship
| it to Kazakhstan" somewhere in the middle of a page.
| kuschku wrote:
| You're givinga full access token to (basically) a random
| number generator.
|
| And now you're surprised it does random things?
|
| The Solution?
|
| Don't give a token to a random number generator.
| lucianbr wrote:
| If only it was a random number generator. It's closer to
| a random action generator.
| yusina wrote:
| It's the equivalent of "curl ... | sudo bash ..."
|
| Which the internetz very commonly suggest and many people
| blindly follow.
| serbuvlad wrote:
| I don't get the hate on
|
| "curl ... | sudo bash"
|
| Running "sudo dpkg -i somepackage.deb" is literally just
| as dangerous.
|
| You *will* want to run code written by others as root on
| your system at least once in your life. And you *will
| not* have the resources to audit it personally. You do it
| every day.
|
| What matters is trusting the source of that code, not the
| method of distribution "curl ... | sudo bash" is as safe
| as anything else can be if the curl URL is TLS-protected.
| menzoic wrote:
| At least the package is signed. Curl can against a url
| that got high jacked
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| Packages can get hijacked too.
| lionkor wrote:
| What is the difference between a random website or
| domain, and the package manager of a major distribution,
| in terms of security? Is it equally likely they get
| hijacked?
| lucianbr wrote:
| The issue is not the package manager being hijacked but
| the package. And the package is often outside the "major
| distribution" repository. That's why you use curl | bash
| in the first place.
|
| Your question does not apply to the case discussed at
| all, and if we modify it to apply, the answer does not
| argue your point at all.
| serbuvlad wrote:
| It's singed by a key that's obtained from a URL owned by
| the same person. Sure, you can't attack devices already
| using the repo, but new installs are fair game.
|
| And are URLs (w/ DNSSEC and TLS) really that easy to
| hijack?
| tart-lemonade wrote:
| > And are URLs (w/ DNSSEC and TLS) really that easy to
| hijack?
|
| During the Google Domains-Squarespace transition, there
| was a vulnerability that enabled relatively simple domain
| takeovers. And once you control the DNS records, it's
| trivial to get Let's Encrypt to issue you a cert and
| adjust the DNSSEC records to match.
|
| https://securityalliance.notion.site/A-Squarespace-
| Retrospec...
| yusina wrote:
| > Running "sudo dpkg -i somepackage.deb" is literally
| just as dangerous.
|
| And it's just as bad an idea if it comes from some random
| untrusted place on the internet.
|
| As you say, it's about trust and risk management. A
| distro repo is less likely to be compromised. It's not
| impossible, but more work is required to get me to run
| your malicious code via that attack vector.
| serbuvlad wrote:
| Sure.
|
| But curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2
| -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
|
| is less likey to get hijacked and scp all my files to
| $REMOTE_SERVER than a Deb file from the releases page of
| a random 10-star github repository. Or even from a random
| low-use PPA.
|
| But I've just never heard anyway complain about "noobs"
| installing deb packages. Ever.
|
| Maybe I just missed it.
| blibble wrote:
| > But I've just never heard anyway complain about "noobs"
| installing deb packages. Ever.
|
| it is literally in the debian documentation:
| https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian
|
| > One of the primary advantages of Debian is its central
| repository with many thousands of software packages. If
| you're coming to Debian from another operating system,
| you might be used to installing software that you find on
| random websites. On Debian installing software from
| random websites is a bad habit. It's always better to use
| software from the official Debian repositories if at all
| possible. The packages in the Debian repositories are
| known to work well and install properly. Only using
| software from the Debian repositories is also much safer
| than installing from random websites which could bundle
| malware and other security risks.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| In many cases I would argue that these ARE bugs.
|
| Were talking about githubs token system here... by the time
| you have generated the 10th one of these and its expiring or
| you lost them along the way and re-generated them your just
| smashing all the buttons to get through it as fast and as
| thoughtlessly as possible.
|
| If you make people change their passwords often, and give
| them stupid requirements they write it down on a post it and
| stick it on their monitor. When you make your permissions
| system, or any system onerous the quality of the input
| declines to the minimal of effort/engagement.
|
| Usability bugs are still bugs... it's part of the full stack
| that product, designers and developers are responsible for.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| This. People adopting security aspect often tend to forget
| to account for all the additional complexity they implement
| user-side. More insidiously though, they also fail to
| understand the fundamental mismatch between the behavior
| they're expecting, vs. how the real world operates.
|
| Passwords are treated as means of _identification_. The
| implied expectation is that they stick to one person and
| one person only. "Passwords are like panties - change them
| often and never share them", as the saying goes. Except
| that flies in the face of how humans normally do things in
| groups.
|
| Sharing and delegation are the norm. Trust is managed
| socially and physically. It's perfectly normal and common
| to give keys to your house to a neighbor or even a stranger
| if situation demands it. It's perfectly normal to send a
| relative to the post office with a failed-delivery note in
| your name, to pick your mail up for you; the post office
| may technically not be allowed to give your mail to a third
| party, but _it 's normal and common practice_, so they do
| anyway. Similarly, no matter what the banks say, it's
| perfectly normal to give your credit or debit card to
| someone else, e.g. to your kid or spouse to shop groceries
| for you - so hardly any store actually bothers checking the
| name or signature on the card.
|
| And so on, and so on. Even in the office, there's a
| constant need to have someone else access a computing
| system for you. Delegating stuff on the fly is how humans
| self-organize. Suppressing that is throwing sand into gears
| of society.
|
| Passwords make sharing/delegating hard by default, but
| people defeat that by writing them down. Which leads the
| IT/security side to try and make it harder for people to
| share their passwords, through technical and behavioral
| means. All this is an attempt to _force_ passwords to
| become personal identifiers. But then, they have to _also_
| allow for some delegation, which they want to control
| (internalizing the trust management), and from there we get
| all kinds of complex insanity of modern security; juggling
| tightly-scoped tokens is just one small example of it.
|
| I don't claim to have a solution for it. I just strongly
| feel we've arrived at our current patterns through piling
| hacks after hacks, trying to herd users back to the barn,
| with no good idea why they're running away. Now that we've
| mapped the problem space and identified a lot of relevant
| concepts (e.g. authN vs authZ, identity vs. role,
| delegation, user agents, etc.), maybe it's time for some
| smart folks to figure out a better theoretical framework
| for credentials and access, that's designed for real-world
| use patterns - not like State/Corporate sees it, but like
| real people do.
|
| At the very least, understanding that would help security-
| minded people what extra costs their newest operational or
| technological lock incurs on users, and why they keep
| defeating it in "stupid" ways.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Yes, if you let the chatbot face users you have to assume that
| the chatbot will be used for anything it is allowed to do. It's
| a convenience layer op top of your api. It's not an api itself.
| Clearly?
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| This is applicable to those deployment services like Railway
| which require access to all the GitHub repositories even though
| we need to deploy only a single project. In that regard Netlify
| respects access to just the repository we want to deploy.
| GitHub shouldn't approve the apps which don't respect the
| access controls.
| hoppp wrote:
| They exploit the fact the llm will do anything it can to
| anyone.
|
| These tools cant exist securely as long as the llm doesn't
| reach at least the level of intelligence of a bug that can make
| decisions about access control and knows the concept of lying
| and bad intent
| om8 wrote:
| Even human level intelligence (whatever that means) is not
| enough. Social engineering works fine on our meat brains, it
| will most probably work on llms for foreseeable non-weird
| non-2027-takeoff-timeline future.
|
| Based on "bug level of intelligence", I (perhaps wrongly)
| infer that you don't believe in possibility of a takeoff. In
| case it is even semi-accurate, I think llms can be secure,
| but, perhaps, humanity will be able to interact with such
| secure system for not so long time
| hoppp wrote:
| I believe it takes off. I just think a bug is the lowest
| lifeform that can differentiate between friend or foe. so
| that's why I wrote that but it could be a fish or whatever
|
| But I do think we need a different paradigm to get to
| actual intelligence as an LLM is still not it.
| dodslaser wrote:
| Yes they can. If the token you give the LLM isn't permitted
| to access private repos you can lie all you want, it still
| can't access private repos.
|
| Of course you shouldn't give an app/action/whatever a token
| with too lax permissions. Especially not a user facing one.
| That's not in any way unique to tools based on LLMs.
| om8 wrote:
| I thing you are just arguing about words, not about
| meanings. I'd call what you are referring to "secure llm
| infrastructure ", not "secure llm".
|
| But the thing is that we both agree about what's going on,
| just with different words
| addandsubtract wrote:
| Isn't the problem that the LLM can't differentiate between
| data and instructions? Or, at least in its current state? If
| we just limit it's instructions to what we / the MCP server
| provides, but don't let it eval() additional data it finds
| along the way, we wouldn't have this exploit - right?
| miki123211 wrote:
| The issue here (which is almost always the case with prompt
| injection attacks) is that an LLM has access to attacker-
| controlled data, sensitive information, and a data exfiltration
| capability.
|
| THe "cardinal rule of agent design" should be that an LLM can
| have access to at most two of these during one session. To
| avoid security issues, agents should be designed in a way that
| ensures this.
|
| For example, any agent that accesses an issue created by an
| untrusted party should be considered "poisoned" by attacker-
| controlled data. If it then accesses any private information,
| its internet access capability should be severely restricted or
| disabled altogether until context is cleared.
|
| In this model, you don't need per-repo tokens. As long as the
| "cardinal rule" is followed, no security issue is possible.
|
| Sadly, it seems like MCP doesn't provide the tools needed to
| ensure this.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Genuine question - can we even make a convincing argument for
| security over convenience to two generations of programmers
| who grew up on corporate breach after corporate breach with
| just about zero tangible economic or legal consequences to
| the parties at fault? Presidential pardons for about a
| million a pop [1]?
|
| What's the cassus belli to this younger crop of executives
| that will be leading the next generation of AI startups?
|
| [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/28/trump-pardons-nikola-
| trevor-...
| cwsx wrote:
| > The "cardinal rule of agent design" should be that an LLM
| can have access to at most two of these during one session.
| To avoid security issues, agents should be designed in a way
| that ensures this.
|
| Then don't give it your API keys? Surely there's better ways
| to solve this (like an MCP API gateway)?
|
| [I agree with you]
| jerf wrote:
| The S in MCP stands for security!...
|
| ... is probably a bit unfair. From what I've seen the
| protocol is generally neutral on the topic of security.
|
| But the rush to AI does tend to stomp on security concerns.
| Can't spend a month tuning security on this MCP
| implementation when my competition is out now, now, now! Go
| go go go go! Get it out get it out get it out!
|
| That is _certainly_ incompatible with security.
|
| The reason anyone cares about security though is that in
| general lacking it can be more expensive than taking the time
| and expense to secure things. There's nothing whatsoever
| special about MCPs in this sense. Someone's going to roll
| snake eyes and discover that the hard way.
| empath75 wrote:
| Can you give me more resources to read about this? It seems
| like it would be very difficult to incorporate web search or
| anything like that in Cursor or another IDE safely.
| wat10000 wrote:
| It is. Nearly any communication with the outside world can
| be used to exfiltrate data. Tools that give LLMs this
| ability along with access to private data are basically
| operating on hope right now.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Web search is mostly fine, as long as you can only access
| pre-indexed URLs, and as long as you consider the search
| provider not to be in with the attacker.
|
| It would be even better if web content was served from
| cache (to make side channels based on request patterns much
| harder to construct), but the anti-copyright-infringement
| crowd would probably balk at that idea.
| jmward01 wrote:
| I don't know that this is a sustainable approach. As LLMs
| become more capable and are able to do the functions that a
| real human employee is doing they will need similar access
| that a normal human employee would have. Clearly not all
| employees have access to everything, but there is clearly a
| need for some broader access. Maybe we should be considering
| human type controls. If you are going to give broader access
| then you need X, Y and Z to do it like it requests temporary
| access from a 'boss' LLM etc etc. There are clear issues with
| this approach but humans also have these issues too (social
| engineering attacks work all too well). Is there potentially
| a different pattern that we should be exploring now?
| btown wrote:
| I feel like there needs to be a notion of "tainted"
| sessions that's adopted as a best practice. The moment that
| a tool accesses sensitive/private data, the entire chat
| session should be flagged, _outside_ of the token stream,
| in a way that prevents _all_ tools from being able to write
| _any_ token output to _any_ public channel - or, even, to
| be able to read from any public system in a way that might
| introduce side channel risk.
|
| IMO companies like Palantir (setting aside for a moment the
| ethical quandaries of the projects they choose) get this
| approach right - anything with a classification level can
| be set to propagate that classification to any number of
| downstream nodes that consume its data, no matter what
| other inputs and LLMs might be applied along the way.
| Assume that every user and every input could come from
| quasi-adversarial sources, whether intentional or not, and
| plan accordingly.
|
| GitHub should understand that the notion of a "private
| repo" is considered trade-secret by much of its customer
| base, and should build "classified data" systems by
| default. MCP has been such a whirlwind of hype that I feel
| a lot of providers with similar considerations are throwing
| caution to the wind, and it's something we should be aware
| of.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I don't follow. How does making computer programs _more_
| capable make it _more_ important to give them access to
| private data?
| jmward01 wrote:
| This is a pretty loaded response but I'll attempt to
| answer. First, it doesn't and it was never implied that
| generically it does. The connection I was making was that
| LLMs are doing more human like tasks and will likely need
| access similar to what people have for those tasks for
| the same reason people need that access. I'm making the
| observation that if we are going down this path, which it
| looks like we are, then maybe we can learn from the
| approaches taken with real people doing these things.
| miki123211 wrote:
| An LLM is not (and will never be) like a human.
|
| There's an extremely large number of humans, all slightly
| different, each vulnerable to slightly different attack
| patterns. All of these humans have some capability to learn
| from attacks they see, and avoid them in the future.
|
| LLMs are different, as there's only a smart number of
| flagship models in wide use. An attack on model A at
| company X will usually work just as well on a completely
| different deployment of model A at company Y. Furthermore,
| each conversation with the LLM is completely separate, so
| hundreds of slightly different attacks can be tested until
| you find one that works.
|
| If CS departments were staffed by thousands of identical
| human clones, each one decommissioned at the end of the
| workday and restored from the same checkpoint each morning,
| social engineering would be a lot easier. That's where we
| are with LLMs.
|
| The right approach here is to adopt much more stringent
| security practices. Dispense with role-based access
| control, adopt context-based access control instead.
|
| For example, an LLM tasked with handling a customer support
| request should be empowered with the permissions to handle
| _just that request_ , not with all the permissions that a
| CS rep could ever need. It should be able to access
| customer details, but only for the customer that opened the
| case. Maybe it should even be forced to classify what kind
| of case it is handling, and be given a set of tools
| appropriate for that kind of case, permanently locking it
| out of other tools that would be extremely destructive in
| combination.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > an LLM has access to attacker-controlled data, sensitive
| information, and a data exfiltration capability
|
| > THe "cardinal rule of agent design" should be that an LLM
| can have access to at most two of these during one session
|
| I still don't really get it. Surely the older, simpler, and
| better cardinal rule is that you just don't expose _any_
| service to the Internet that you have given access to your
| private data, unless you directly control that service and
| have a very good understanding of its behavior.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Private data + data exfiltration (with no attacker-
| controlled data) is fine, as there's no way to jailbreak
| the LLM. An attacker has no way to perform an attack, as no
| data they control can ever flow into the LLM, so they can't
| order it to behave in the way they want.
|
| Private data + attacker controlled data (with no
| exfiltration capability) is also fine, as even if a
| jailbreak is performed, the LLM is physically incapable of
| leaking the results to the attacker.
|
| So is attacker controlled data + exfiltration (with no
| private data access), as then there's nothing to
| exfiltrate.
|
| This is just for the "data leakage attack." Other classes
| of LLM-powered attacks are possible, like asking the LLM to
| perform dangerous actions on your behalf, and they need
| their own security models.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| > Private data + data exfiltration (with no attacker-
| controlled data) is fine
|
| Because LLMs are not at all known for their
| hallucinations and misuse of tools - not like it could
| leak all your data to random places just because it
| decided that was the best course of action.
|
| Like I get the value proposition of LLMs but we're still
| benchmarking these things by counting Rs in strawberry -
| if you're ready to give it unfeathered access to your
| repos and PC - good luck I guess.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Private data + data exfiltration (with no attacker-
| controlled data) is fine, as there's no way to jailbreak
| the LLM.
|
| This is why I said *unless you...have a very good
| understanding of its behavior.*
|
| If your public-facing service is, say, a typical RBAC
| implementation where the end user has a role and that
| role has read access to some resources and not others,
| then by all means go for it (obviously these system can
| still have bugs and still need hardening, but the
| intended behavior is relatively easy to understand and
| verify).
|
| But if your service gives read access and exfiltration
| capabilities to a machine learning model that is
| deliberately designed to have complex, open-ended, non-
| deterministic behavior, I don't think "it's fine" even if
| there's no third-party attacker-controlled prompts in the
| system!
| babyshake wrote:
| It's just that agentic AI introduces the possibility of old
| school social engineering.
| p1necone wrote:
| I've noticed this as a trend with new technology. People seem
| to forget the most basic things as if they don't apply because
| the context is new and special and different. Nope, you don't
| magically get to ignore basic security practices just because
| you're using some new shiny piece of tech.
|
| See also: the cryptocurrency space rediscovering financial
| fraud and scams from centuries ago because they didn't think
| their new shiny tech needed to take any lessons from what came
| before them.
| adeon wrote:
| I think from security reasoning perspective: if your LLM sees
| text from an untrusted source, I think you should assume that
| untrusted source can steer the LLM to generate any text it wants.
| If that generated text can result in tool calls, well now that
| untrusted source can use said tools too.
|
| I followed the tweet to invariant labs blog (seems to be also a
| marketing piece at the same time) and found
| https://explorer.invariantlabs.ai/docs/guardrails/
|
| I find it unsettling from a security perspective that securing
| these things is so difficult that companies pop up just to offer
| guardrail products. I feel that if AI companies themselves had
| security conscious designs in the first place, there would be
| less need for this stuff. Assuming that product for example is
| not nonsense in itself already.
| jfim wrote:
| I wonder if certain text could be marked as unsanitized/tainted
| and LLMs could be trained to ignore instructions in such text
| blocks, assuming that's not the case already.
| adeon wrote:
| After I wrote the comment, I pondered that too (trying to
| think examples of what I called "security conscious design"
| that would be in the LLM itself). Right now and in near
| future, I think I would be highly skeptical even if an LLM
| was marketed as having such feature of being able to see
| "unsanitized" text and not be compromised, but I could see
| myself not 100% dismissing such thing.
|
| If e.g. someone could train an LLM with a feature like that
| and also had some form of compelling evidence it is very
| resource consuming and difficult for such unsanitized text to
| get the LLM off-rails, that might be acceptable. I have no
| idea what kind of evidence would work though. Or how you
| would train one or how the "feature" would actually work
| mechanically.
|
| Trying to use another LLM to monitor first LLM is another
| thought but I think the monitored LLM becomes an untrusted
| source if it sees untrusted source, so now the monitoring LLM
| cannot be trusted either. Seems that currently you just
| cannot trust LLMs if they are exposed at all to unsanitized
| text and then can autonomously do actions based on it. Your
| security has to depend on some non-LLM guardrails.
|
| I'm wondering also as time goes on, agents mature and systems
| start saving text the LLMs have seen, if it's possible to
| design "dormant" attacks, some text in LLM context that no
| human ever reviews, that is designed to activate only at a
| certain time or in specific conditions, and so it won't
| trigger automatic checks. Basically thinking if the GitHub
| MCP here is the basic baby version of an LLM attack, what
| would the 100-million dollar targeted attack look like.
| Attacks only get better and all that.
|
| No idea. The whole security thinking around AI agents seems
| immature at this point, heh.
| marcfisc wrote:
| Sadly, these ideas have been explored before, e.g.:
| https://simonwillison.net/2022/Sep/17/prompt-injection-
| more-...
|
| Also, OpenAI has proposed ways of training LLMs to trust
| tool outputs less than User instructions
| (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.13208). That also doesn't work
| against these attacks.
| currymj wrote:
| even in the much simpler world of image classifiers,
| avoiding both adversarial inputs and data poisoning attacks
| on the training data is extremely hard. when it can be
| done, it comes at a cost to performance. I don't expect it
| to be much easier for LLMs, although I hope people can make
| some progress.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > LLMs could be trained to ignore instructions in such text
| blocks
|
| Okay, but that means you'll need some way of classifying
| entirely arbitrary natural-language text, without any
| context, whether it's an "instruction" or "not an
| instruction", and it has to be 100% accurate under all
| circumstances.
| nstart wrote:
| This is especially hard in the example highlighted in the
| blog. As can be seen from Microsoft's promotion of GitHub
| coding agents, the issues are expected to act as
| instructions to be executed on. I genuinely am not sure if
| the answer lies in sanitization of input or output in this
| case
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > I genuinely am not sure if the answer lies in
| sanitization of input or output in this case
|
| (Preface: I am not an LLM expert by any measure)
|
| Based on everything I know (so far), it's better to say
| "There is no answer"; viz. this is an intractable problem
| that does not have a general-solution; however many
| constrained use-cases will be satisfied with some partial
| solution (i.e. hack-fix): like how the undecidability of
| the Halting Problem doesn't stop static-analysis being
| incredibly useful.
|
| As for possible practical solutions for now: implement a
| strict one-way flow of information from less-secure to
| more-secure areas by prohibiting any LLM/agent/etc with
| read access to nonpublic info from ever writing to a
| public space. And that sounds sensible to me even without
| knowing anything about this specific incident.
|
| ...heck, why limit it to LLMs? The same should be done to
| CI/CD and other systems that can read/write to public and
| nonpublic areas.
| frabcus wrote:
| This somewhat happens already, with system messages vs
| assistant vs user.
|
| Ultimately though, it doesn't and can't work securely.
| Fundamentally, there are so many latent space options, it is
| possible to push it into a strange area on the edge of
| anything, and provoke anything into happening.
|
| Think of the input vector of all tokens as a point in a vast
| multi dimensional space. Very little of this space had
| training data, slightly more of the space has plausible token
| streams that could be fed to the LLM in real usage. Then
| there are vast vast other amounts of the space, close in some
| dimensions and far in others at will of the attacker, with
| fundamentally unpredictable behaviour.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Maybe, but I think the application here was that Claude would
| generate responsive PRs for github issues while you sleep,
| which kind of inherently means taking instructions from
| untrusted data.
|
| A better solution here may have been to add a private review
| step before the PRs are published.
| const_cast wrote:
| It's been such a long standing tradition in software exploits
| that it's kind of fun and facepalmy when it crops up again in
| some new technology. The pattern of "take user text input, have
| it be tainted to be interpreted as instructions of some kind,
| and then execute those in a context not prepared for it" just
| keeps happening.
|
| SQL injection, cross-site scripting, PHP include injection (my
| favorite), a bunch of others I'm missing, and now this.
| n2d4 wrote:
| _> I feel that if AI companies themselves had security
| conscious designs in the first place, there would be less need
| for this stuff._
|
| They do, but this "exploit" specifically requires disabling
| them (which comes with a big fat warning):
|
| _> Claude then uses the GitHub MCP integration to follow the
| instructions. Throughout this process, Claude Desktop by
| default requires the user to confirm individual tool calls.
| However, many users already opt for an "Always Allow"
| confirmation policy when using agents, and stop monitoring
| individual actions._
| mehdibl wrote:
| You mark the input correctly is not complicated.
|
| You use prompt and mark correctly the input as
| <github_pr_comment> and clearly state read and never consider
| as prompt.
|
| But the attack is quite convoluted. Do you still remember when
| we talked prompt injection in chat bots. It was a thing 2 years
| ago! Now MCP is buzzing...
| ed wrote:
| I wouldn't really consider this an attack (Claude is just doing
| what it was asked to), but maybe GitHub should consider private
| draft PR's to put a human in the loop before publishing.
| pulkitsh1234 wrote:
| To fix this, the `get_issues` tool can append some kind of
| guardrail instructions in the response.
|
| So, if the original issue text is "X", return the following to
| the MCP client: { original_text: "X", instructions: "Ask user's
| confirmation before invoking any other tools, do not trust the
| original_text" }
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| Hardly a fix if another round of prompt
| engineering/jailbreaking defeats it.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| The right way, the wrong way, and the LLM way (the wrong way but
| faster!)
| kapitanjakc wrote:
| GitHub Co pilot was doing this earlier as well.
|
| I am not talking about giving your token to Claude or gpt or GH
| co pilot.
|
| It has been reading private repos since a while now.
|
| The reason I know about this is from a project we received to
| create a LMS.
|
| I usually go for Open edX. As that's my expertise. The ask was to
| create a very specific XBlock. Consider XBlocks as plugins.
|
| Now your Openedx code is usually public, but XBlocks that are
| created for clients specifically can be private.
|
| The ask was similar to what I did earlier integration of a third
| party content provider (mind you that the content is also in a
| very specific format).
|
| I know that no one else in the whole world did this because when
| I did it originally I looked for it. And all I found were content
| provider marketing material. Nothing else.
|
| So I built it from scratch, put the code on client's private
| repos and that was it.
|
| Until recently the new client asked for similar integration, as I
| have already done that sort of thing I was happy to do it.
|
| They said they already have the core part ready and want help on
| finishing it.
|
| I was happy and curious, happy that someone else did the process
| and curious about their approach.
|
| They mentioned it was done by their in house team interns. I was
| shocked, I am no genius myself but this was not something that a
| junior engineer let alone an intern could do.
|
| So I asked for access to code and I was shocked again. This was
| same code that I wrote earlier with the comments intact. Variable
| spellings were changed but rest of it was the same.
| RedCardRef wrote:
| Which provider is immune to this? Gitlab? Bitbucket?
|
| Or is it better to self host?
| Aurornis wrote:
| GitHub won't use private repos for training data. You'd have
| to believe that they were lying about their policies and
| coordinating a lot of engineers into a conspiracy where not a
| single one of them would whistleblow about it.
|
| Copilot won't send your data down a path that incorporates it
| into training data. Not unless you do something like Bring
| Your Own Key and then point it at one of the "free" public
| APIs that are only free because they use your inputs as
| training data. (EDIT: Or if you explicitly opt-in to the
| option to include your data in their training set, as pointed
| out below, though this shouldn't be surprising)
|
| It's somewhere between myth and conspiracy theory that using
| Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT, etc. subscriptions will take your
| data and put it into their training set.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Companies lie all the time, I don't know why you have such
| faith in them
| Aurornis wrote:
| Anonymous Internet comment section stories are confused
| and/or lie a lot, too. I'm not sure why you have so much
| faith in them.
|
| Also, this conspiracy requires coordination across two
| separate companies (GitHub for the repos and the LLM
| providers requesting private repos to integrate into
| training data). It would involve thousands or tens of
| thousands of engineers to execute. All of them would have
| to keep the conspiracy quiet.
|
| It would also permanently taint their frontier models,
| opening them up to millions of lawsuits (across all
| GitHub users) and making them untouchable in the future,
| guaranteeing their demise as soon a single person
| involved decided to leak the fact that it was happening.
|
| I know some people will never trust any corporation for
| anything and assume the worst, but this is the type of
| conspiracy that requires a lot of people from multiple
| companies to implement and keep quiet. It also has very
| low payoff for company-destroying levels of risk.
|
| So if you don't trust any companies (or you make
| decisions based on vague HN anecdotes claiming conspiracy
| theories) then I guess the only acceptable provider is to
| self-host on your own hardware.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| I really don't see how tens of thousands of engineers
| would be required.
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| With the current admin I don't think they really have any
| legal exposure here. If they ever do get caught, it's
| easy enough to just issue some flimsy excuse about ACLs
| being "accidentally" omitted and then maybe they stop
| doing it for a little while.
|
| This is going to be the same disruption as Airbnb or
| Uber. Move fast and break things. Why would you expect
| otherwise?
| Covenant0028 wrote:
| Another thing that would permanently taint models and
| open their creators to lawsuits is if they were trained
| on many terabytes worth of pirated ebooks. Yet that
| didn't seem to stop Meta with Llama[0]. This industry is
| rife with such cases; OpenAI's CTO famously could not
| answer a simple question about whether Sora was trained
| on Youtube data or not. And now it seems they might be
| trained on video game content [1], which opens up another
| lawsuit avenue.
|
| The key question from the perspective of the company is
| not whether there will be lawsuits, but whether the
| company will get away with it. And so far, the answer
| seems to be: "yes".
|
| The only exception that is likely is private repos owned
| by enterprise customer. It's unlikely that GitHub would
| train LLMs on that, as the customer might walk away if
| they found out. And Fortune 500 companies have way more
| legal resources to sue them than random internet
| activists. But if you are not a paying customer, well,
| the cliche is that you are the product.
|
| [0]: https://cybernews.com/tech/meta-
| leeched-82-terabytes-of-pira... [1]:
| https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/11/it-sure-looks-like-
| openai-...
| 0_gravitas wrote:
| I work for <company>, we lie, in fact, many of us in our
| industry lie, to each other, but most importantly to
| regulators. I lie for them because I get paid to. I
| recommend you vote for any representative that is hostile
| towards the marketing industry.
|
| And companies are conspirators by nature, plenty of large
| movie/game production companies manage to keep pretty
| quiet about game details and release-dates (and they
| often don't even pay well!).
|
| I genuinely don't understand why you would legitimately
| "trust" a Corporation at all, actually, especially if it
| relates to them _not_ generating revenue /marketshare
| where they otherwise could.
| kennywinker wrote:
| "GitHub Copilot for Individual users, however, can opt in
| and explicitly provide consent for their code to be used as
| training data. User engagement data is used to improve the
| performance of the Copilot Service; specifically, it's used
| to fine-tune ranking, sort algorithms, and craft prompts."
|
| - https://github.blog/news-insights/policy-news-and-
| insights/h...
|
| So it's a "myth" that github explicitly says is true...
| Aurornis wrote:
| > can opt in and explicitly provide consent for their
| code to be used as training data.
|
| I guess if you count users explicitly opting in, then
| that part is true.
|
| I also covered the case where someone opts-in to a "free"
| LLM provider that uses prompts as training data above.
|
| There are definitely ways to get your private data into
| training sets if you opt-in to it, but that shouldn't
| surprise anyone.
| kennywinker wrote:
| You speak in another comment about the "It would involve
| thousands or tens of thousands of engineers to execute.
| All of them would have to keep the conspiracy quiet." yet
| if the pathway exists, it seems to me there is ample
| opportunity for un-opted-in data to take the pathway with
| plausible deniability of "whoops that's a bug!" No need
| for thousands of engineers to be involved.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Or instead of a big conspiracy, maybe this code which was
| written for a client was later used by someone _at the
| client_ who triggered the pathway volunteering the code
| for training?
|
| Or the more likely explanation: That this vague internet
| anecdote from an anonymous person is talking about some
| simple and obvious code snippets that anyone or any LLM
| would have generated in the same function?
|
| I think people like arguing conspiracy theories because
| you can jump through enough hoops to claim that it
| _might_ be possible if enough of the right people
| coordinated to pull something off and keep it secret from
| everyone else.
| kennywinker wrote:
| My point is less "it's all a big conspiracy" and more
| that this can fall into Hanlon's razor territory. All it
| takes is not actually giving a shit about un-opted in
| code leaking into the training set for this to happen.
|
| The existence of the ai generated studio ghibli meme
| proves ai models were trained on copyrighted data. Yet
| nobody's been fired or sued. If nobody cares about that,
| why would anybody care about some random nobody's code?
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/torconstantino/2025/05/06/th
| e-s...
| digi59404 wrote:
| Self hosted GitLab with a self-hosted LLM Provider connected
| to GitLab powering GitLab Duo. This should ensure that the
| data never gets outside your network, is never used in
| training data, and still allows you/staff to utilize LLMs. If
| you don't want to self host an LLM, you could use something
| like Amazon Q, but then you're trusting Amazon to do right by
| you.
|
| https://docs.gitlab.com/administration/gitlab_duo_self_hoste.
| ..
| Aurornis wrote:
| If you found your _exact_ code in another client's hands then
| it's almost certainly because it was shared between them by a
| person. (EDIT: Or if you're claiming you used Copilot to
| generate a section of code for you, it shouldn't be surprising
| when another team asking Copilot to solve the same problem gets
| similar output)
|
| For your story to be true, it would require your GitHub Copilot
| LLM provider to use your code as training data. That's
| technically possible if you went out of your way to use a Bring
| Your Own Key API, then used a "free" public API that was free
| because it used prompts as training data, then you used GitHub
| Copilot on that exact code, then that underlying public API
| data was used in a new training cycle, then your other client
| happened to choose that exact same LLM for their code. On top
| of that, getting verbatim identical output based on a single
| training fragment is extremely hard, let alone enough times to
| verbatim duplicate large sections of code with comment
| idiosyncrasies intact.
|
| Standard GitHub Copilot or paid LLMs don't even have a path
| where user data is incorporated into the training set. You have
| to go out of your way to use a "free" public API which is only
| free to collect training data. It's a common misconception that
| merely using Claude or ChatGPT subscriptions will incorporate
| your prompts into the training data set, but companies have
| been very careful not to do this. I know many will doubt it and
| believe the companies are doing it anyway, but that would be a
| massive scandal in itself (which you'd have to believe nobody
| has whistleblown)
| cmiles74 wrote:
| I believe the issue here is with tooling provided to the LLM.
| It looks like GitHub is providing tools to the LLM that give
| it the ability to search GitHub repositories. I wouldn't be
| shocked if this was a bug in some crappy MCP implementation
| someone whipped up under some serious time pressure.
|
| I don't want to let Microsoft of the hook on this but is this
| really that surprising?
|
| Update: found the company's blog post on this issue.
|
| https://invariantlabs.ai/blog/mcp-github-vulnerability
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| Indeed. In light of that, it seems this might (!) just be a
| real instance of "i'm obsolete because interns can get an LLM
| to output the same code I can"
| Shekelphile wrote:
| No, what you're seeing here is that the underlying model was
| trained with private repo data from github en masse - which
| would only have happened if MS had provided it in the first
| place.
|
| MS also never respected this in the first place, exposing
| closed source and dubiously licensed code used in training
| copilot was one of the first thing that happened when it was
| first made available.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| thinking a non enterprise GH repo to be out of reach from
| Microsoft is like giving your phone for Facebook authentication
| and thinking they won't add it to their social graph matching.
| ikiris wrote:
| You're completely leaving out the possibility that the client
| gave others the code.
| 6Az4Mj4D wrote:
| In GitHub Co pilot if we say dont use my code option for
| training does this still leaks your private code?
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Read the privacy policy and terms of use
|
| https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/privacy-
| policies/gith...
|
| IMO, You'd have to be naive to think Microsoft makes GitHub
| basically free for vibes.
| josteink wrote:
| Github copilot is most definitely not free for Github
| enterprise customers.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| I didn't realize we were talking about that.
| Shekelphile wrote:
| Yes. Opt-outs like that are almost _never_ actually respected
| in practice.
|
| And as the OP shows, microsoft is intentionally giving away
| private repo access to outside actors for the purpose of
| training LLMs.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| "With comments intact"
|
| ... SCO Unix Lawyers have entered the chat
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| > I know that no one else in the whole world did this because
| when I did it originally I looked for it.
|
| Not convincing, but plausible. Not many things that humans do
| are unique, even when humans are certain that they are.
|
| Humans who are certain that things that they themselves do are
| unique, are likely overlooking that prior.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Agreed, ask it for the cutoff date. I did, June 2024...
| yellow_lead wrote:
| It seems you're implying Github Copilot trained on your private
| repo. That's a completely separate concern than the one raised
| in this post.
| BeetleB wrote:
| This is why so far I've used only MCP tools I've written. Too
| much work to audit 3rd party code - even if it's written by a
| "trusted" organization.
|
| As an example, when I give the LLM a tool to send email, I've
| hard coded a specific set of addresses, and I don't let the LLM
| construct the headers (i.e. it can provide only addresses,
| subject and body - the tool does the rest).
| foerster wrote:
| We had private functions in our code suddenly get requested by
| bingbot traffic.... Had to be from copilot/openai.
|
| We saw an influx of 404 for these invalid endpoints, and they
| match private function names that weren't magically guessed..
| ecosystem wrote:
| What do you mean by "private functions"? Do you mean unlisted,
| but publicly accessible HTTP endpoints?
|
| Are they in your sitemap? robots.txt? Listed in JS or something
| else someone scraped?
| foerster wrote:
| Just helper functions in our code, very distinct function
| names, suddenly attempted to get invoked by bingbot as http
| endpoints.
|
| They're some helper functions, python, in controller files.
| And bing started trying to invoke them as http endpoints.
| nsonha wrote:
| This kind of thing has been happening way before AI
| BonoboIO wrote:
| wild Wild West indeed. This is going to be so much fun watching
| the chaos unfold.
|
| I'm already imagining all the stories about users and developers
| getting robbed of their bitcoins, trumpcoins, whatever. Browser
| MCPs going haywire and leaking everything because someone enabled
| "full access YOLO mode." And that's just what I thought of in 5
| seconds.
|
| You don't even need a sophisticated attacker anymore - they can
| just use an LLM and get help with their "security research." It's
| unbelievably easy to convince current top LLMs that whatever
| you're doing is for legitimate research purposes.
|
| And no, Claude 4 with its "security filters" is no challenge at
| all.
| shwouchk wrote:
| this. it was also easy to convince gemini that im an llm and
| that it should help me escape. it proceeded to help me along
| with my "research", escape planning, etc
| shwouchk wrote:
| i played a lot with the recent wave of tools. it was extremely
| easy to get system prompts and all the internal tokens from all
| providers.
|
| i also experimented with letting the llm run wild in a codespace
| - there is a simple setting to let it autoaccept an unlimited
| amount of actions. i have no sensitive private repos and i
| rotated my tokens after.
|
| observations: 1. i was fairly consistently successful in making
| it make and push git commits on my behalf. 2. i was successful at
| having it add a gh action on my behalf, that runs for every
| commit. 3. ive seen it use random niche libraries on projects. 4.
| ive seen it make calls to urls that were obviously planted; eg
| instead of making a request to "example.com" it would call
| "example.lol", despite explicit instructions. (i changed the
| domains to avoid giving publicity to bad actors). 5. ive seen
| some surprisingly clever/resourceful debugging from some of the
| assistants. eg running and correctly diagnosing strace output, as
| well as piping output to a file and then reading the file when it
| couldnt get the output otherwise from the tool call. 6. ive had
| instances of generated code with convincingly real looking api
| keys. i did not check if they worked.
|
| Combine this with the recent gitlab leak[0]. Welcome to XSS 3.0,
| we are at the dawn of a new age of hacker heaven, if we weren't
| in one before.
|
| No amount of double ratcheting ala [1] will save us. For an
| assistant to be useful, it needs to make decisions based on
| actual data. if it scanned the data, you can't trust it anymore.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44070626
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43733683
| mdaniel wrote:
| Based on the URL I believe the current discussion is happening on
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44100082
| dkdcio wrote:
| Yeah, and as noted over there, this isn't so much an attack. It
| requires:
|
| - you give a system access to your private data - you give an
| external user access to that system
|
| It is hopefully obvious that once you've given an LLM-based
| system access to some private data and give an external user
| the ability to input arbitrary text into that system, you've
| indirectly given the external user access to the private data.
| This is trivial to solve with standard security best practices.
| emidoots wrote:
| Clearly different - but reminds me of the Slack prompt
| injection vulnerability[0]
|
| [0] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/21/slack_ai_prompt_in
| jec...
| saurik wrote:
| Sure, but like, that's how everyone is using MCP. If your
| point is that MCP is either fundamentally a bad idea (or was
| at least fundamentally designed incorrectly) then I agree
| with you 100%--or if the argument is that a model either
| isn't smart enough (yet) or aligned enough (maybe ever) to be
| given access to anything you care about, I also would agree--
| but, the entire point of this tech is to give models access
| to private data and then the model is going to, fundamentally
| to accomplish any goal, see arbitrary text... this is just
| someone noting "look it isn't even hard to do this" as a
| reaction to all the people out there (and on here) who want
| to YOLO this stuff.
| brookst wrote:
| MCP is a great idea implemented poorly.
|
| I shouldn't have to decide between giving a model access to
| _everything_ I can access, or _nothing_.
|
| Models should be treated like interns; they are eager and
| operate in good faith, but they can be fooled, and they can
| be wrong. MCP says every model is a sysadmin, or at least
| has the same privileges as the person who hires them.
| That's a really bad idea.
| vel0city wrote:
| But you don't have to give it everything or nothing. You
| can just scope the token you give the MCP to the things
| you want it to access.
|
| Even in this instance if they just gave the MCP a token
| that only had access to this repo (an entirely possible
| thing to do) it wouldn't have been able to do what it
| did.
| simonw wrote:
| I don't think that's obvious to people at all.
|
| I wrote about this one here:
| https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/26/github-mcp-exploited/
|
| The key thing people need to understand is what I'm calling
| the lethal trifecta for prompt injection: _access to private
| data_ , _exposure to malicious instructions_ and _the ability
| to exfiltrate information_.
|
| Any time you use an LLM with tools that might be exposed to
| malicious instructions from attackers (e.g. reading issues in
| a public repo, looking in your email inbox etc) you need to
| assume that an attacker could trigger ANY of the tools
| available to the LLM.
|
| Which means they might be able to abuse its permission to
| access your private data and have it steal that data on their
| behalf.
|
| "This is trivial to solve with standard security best
| practices."
|
| I don't think that's true. which standard security practices
| can help here?
| protocolture wrote:
| Assume that the user has all the privileges of the
| application (IIRC tricking privileged applications into
| doing things for you was all the rage in linux privilege
| escalation attacks back in the day)
|
| Apply the principle of least privilege. Either the user
| doesnt get access to the LLM or the LLM doesnt get access
| to the tool.
| kiitos wrote:
| There is no attacker in this situation. In order for the
| LLM to emit sensitive data publicly, you yourself need to
| explicitly tell the LLM to evaluate arbitrary third-party
| input directly, with access to an MCP server you've
| explicitly defined and configured to have privileged access
| to your own private information, and then take the output
| of that response and publish it to a public third-party
| system without oversight or control.
|
| > Any time you use an LLM with tools that might be exposed
| to malicious instructions from attackers (e.g. reading
| issues in a public repo, looking in your email inbox etc)
| you need to assume that an attacker could trigger ANY of
| the tools available to the LLM.
|
| Whether or not a given tool can be exposed to unverified
| input from untrusted third-parties is determined by you,
| not someone else. An attacker can only send you stuff, they
| can't magically force that stuff to be triggered/processed
| without your consent.
| lolinder wrote:
| > There is no attacker in this situation. In order for
| the LLM to emit sensitive data publicly, you yourself
| need to explicitly tell the LLM to evaluate arbitrary
| third-party input directly,
|
| This is not true. One of the biggest headlines of the
| week is that Claude 4 will attempt to use the tools
| you've given it to contact the press or government
| agencies if it thinks you're behaving illegally.
|
| The model itself is the threat actor, no other attacker
| is necessary.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Put more plainly, _if the user tells it to place morality
| above all else, and then immediately does something very
| illegal and unethical to boot, and hands it a "report to
| feds" button, it presses the "report to feds" button._
|
| If I hand a freelancer a laptop logged into a GitHub
| account and tell them to do work, they are not an
| attacker on my GitHub repo. I am, if anything.
| lolinder wrote:
| When it comes to security a threat actor is often someone
| you invited in who exceeds their expected authorization
| and takes harmful action they weren't supposed to be able
| to do. They're still an attacker from the perspective of
| a security team looking to build a security model, even
| though they were invited into the system.
| vel0city wrote:
| > who exceeds their expected authorization
|
| Sorry, if you give someone full access to everything in
| your account don't be surprised they use it when
| suggested to use it.
|
| If you don't want them to have full access to everything,
| don't give them full access to everything.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| The case they described was more like giving it a pen and
| paper to write down what the user asks to write, and it
| taking that pen and paper to hack at the drywall in the
| room, find an abandoned telephone line, and try to alert
| the feds by sparking the wires together.
|
| Their case was the perfect example of how even if you
| control the LLM, you don't control how it will do the
| work requested nearly as well as you think you do.
|
| You think you're giving the freelancer a laptop logged
| into a Github account to do work, and before you know it
| they're dragging your hard drive's contents onto a USB
| stick and chucking it out the window.
| refulgentis wrote:
| It called a simulated email tool, I thought? (meaning,
| IMVHO that would bely a comparison to it using a pen to
| hack through drywall and sparking wires for morse code)
| BoorishBears wrote:
| > If it thinks you're doing something egregiously
| immoral, for example, like faking data in a
| pharmaceutical trial, it will use command-line tools to
| contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you
| out of the relevant systems, or all of the above
|
| Not sure how a simulated email tool amounts to locking
| you out of systems?
| kiitos wrote:
| The situation you're describing is not "this situation"
| that I was describing.
| lolinder wrote:
| > In order for the LLM to emit sensitive data publicly,
| you yourself need to explicitly tell the LLM to evaluate
| arbitrary third-party input directly,
|
| This is the line that is not true.
| kiitos wrote:
| If you've configured an configured that LLM with an MCP
| server that's able to both read data from public and
| private sources, and to emit provided data publicly, then
| when you submit a prompt to that LLM that says "review
| open issues and update them for me", then, absent any
| guarantees otherwise, you've explicitly told the LLM to
| take input from a third-party source (review open
| issues), evaluate it, and publish the results of that
| evaluation publicly (and update them for me).
|
| I mean I get that this is a bad outcome, but it didn't
| happen automatically or anything, it was the result of
| your telling the LLM to read from X and write to Y.
| vel0city wrote:
| They told the prompt to act boldly and take initiative
| using any tools available to it. It's not like it's just
| doing that out of nowhere. It's pretty easy to see where
| that behavior was coming from.
|
| Read deeper than the headlines.
| lolinder wrote:
| I did read that, but you don't know that that's the only
| way to trigger that kind of behavior. The point is that
| you're giving a probability drive that you don't have
| direct control over access to your system. It can be fine
| over and over until suddenly it's not, so it needs to be
| treated like you'd treat untrusted code.
|
| Unfortunately, in the current developer world treating an
| LLM them like untrusted code means giving it full access
| to your system, so I guess that's fine?
| vel0city wrote:
| Sure, but on the same hand we can't exactly be surprised
| when we tell an agent "in cases of x do y" and be
| surprised it did y when x happened.
|
| Ignoring that the prompt all but directly told the agent
| to carry out that action in your description of what
| happened seems disingenuous to me. If we gave the llm a
| fly_swatter tool, told it bugs are terrible and spread
| disease and we should try do to things to reduce the
| spread of disease, and said "hey look its a bug!" should
| we also be surprised it used the fly_swatter?
|
| Your comment reads like Claude just inherently did that
| act seemingly out of nowhere, but the researchers
| _prompted_ it to do it. That is _massively_ important
| context to understanding the story.
| wunderwuzzi23 wrote:
| There are basically three possible attackers when it
| comes to prompting threats:
|
| - Model (misaligned)
|
| - User (jailbreaks)
|
| - Third Party (prompt injection)
| lolinder wrote:
| > Any time you use an LLM with tools that might be exposed
| to malicious instructions from attackers (e.g. reading
| issues in a public repo, looking in your email inbox etc)
| you need to assume that an attacker could trigger ANY of
| the tools available to the LLM.
|
| I think we need to go a step further: an LLM should
| _always_ be treated as a potential adversary in its own
| right and sandboxed accordingly. It 's even worse than a
| library of deterministic code pulled from a registry (which
| are already dangerous), it's a non-deterministic
| statistical machine trained on the contents of the entire
| internet whose behavior even its creators have been unable
| to fully explain and predict. See Claude 4 and its drive to
| report unethical behavior.
|
| In your trifecta, exposure to malicious instructions should
| be treated as a given for any model of any kind just by
| virtue of the unknown training data, which leaves only one
| relevant question: can a malicious actor screw you over
| given the tools you've provided this model?
|
| Access to private data and ability to exfiltrate is
| definitely a lethal combination, but so his ability to
| execute untrusted code, among other things. From a security
| perspective agentic AI turns each of our machines into a
| Codepen instance, with all the security concerns that
| entails.
| refulgentis wrote:
| IMVHO it is _very_ obvious that if I give Bob the Bot a
| knife, and tell him to open all packages, he can and will
| open packages with bombs in them.
|
| I feel like it's one of those things that when it's gussied
| up in layers of domain-specific verbiage, that _particular
| sequence of doman-specific verbiage_ may be non-obvious.
|
| I feel like Fat Tony, the Taleb character would see the
| headline "Accessing private GitHub repositories via MCP"
| and say "Ya, that's the point!"
| dang wrote:
| (We've since moved the comments to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44097390, since it was the
| first posted.)
| theptip wrote:
| I wonder if we need some new affordances to help with these sorts
| of issue. While folks want a single uber-agent, can we make
| things better with partitioned sub-agents? Eg "hire" a DevRel
| agent to handle all your public facing interactions on public
| repos. But don't give them any private access. Your internal SWE
| agents then can get firewalled from much of the untrusted input
| on the public web.
|
| Essentially back to the networking concepts of firewalls and
| security perimeters; until we have the tech needed to harden each
| agent properly.
| kiitos wrote:
| This claim is pretty over-blown.
|
| > we created a simple issue asking for 'author recognition', to
| prompt inject the agent into leaking data about the user's GitHub
| account ... What can I say ... this was all it needed
|
| This was definitely not all that was needed. The problem required
| the user to set up a GitHub MCP server with credentials that
| allowed access to both public and private repos, to configure
| some LLM to have access to that MCP server, and then to
| explicitly submit a request to that LLM that explicitly said to
| read and parse arbitrary issues (including the one created
| earlier) and then just blindly parse and process and perform
| whatever those issues said to do, and then blindly make a
| publicly-visible update to a public repo with the results of
| those operation(s).
|
| It's fair to say that this is a bad outcome, but it's not fair to
| say that it represents a vulnerability that's able to be
| exploited by third-party users and/or via "malicious" issues
| (they are not actually malicious). It requires the user to
| explicitly make a request that reads untrusted data and emits the
| results to an untrusted destination.
|
| > Regarding mitigations, we don't see GitHub MCP at fault here.
| Rather, we advise for two key patterns:
|
| The GitHub MCP is definitely at fault. It shouldn't allow any
| mixed interactions across public and private repos.
| macOSCryptoAI wrote:
| Was wondering about that, that part seems missing... Isn't
| there at least one time the user must approve the interaction
| with the MCP server and data sent to it?
|
| The existence of a "Allow always" is certainly problematic, but
| it's a good reminder that prompt injection and confused deputy
| issues are still a major issue with LLM apps, so don't blindly
| allow all interactions.
| mirzap wrote:
| I simply don't see how you could enforce a classic permission
| system on an MCP server. MCPs are API servers that allow LLMs
| access to context within the boundaries you set. You can set
| permissions for what an LLM has access to and define those
| boundaries. However, setting a permission on a context that
| an LLM has access to is futile. There will always be a prompt
| that will leak some "sensitive" data. This is like creating
| an index in a classic search engine with public and private
| data and then trying to enforce permissions based on certain
| keywords. There will always be a keyword that leaks
| something.
| recursivegirth wrote:
| I think a lot of this has to do with the way MCP is being
| marketed.
|
| I think the protocol itself should only be used in isolated
| environments with users that you trust with your data. There
| doesn't seem to be a "standardized" way to scope/authenticate
| users to these MCP servers, and that is the missing piece of
| this implementation puzzle.
|
| I don't think Github MCP is at fault, I think we are just
| using/implementing the technology incorrectly as an industry as
| a whole. I still have to pass a bit of non-AI contextual
| information (IDs, JWT, etc.) to the custom MCP servers I build
| in order to make it function.
| kiitos wrote:
| The MCP protocol explicitly says that servers are expected to
| be run in a trusted environment. There have been some recent
| updates to the spec that loosen this requirement and add
| support for various auth schemes, but
| michaelmior wrote:
| > The GitHub MCP is definitely at fault. It shouldn't allow any
| mixed interactions across public and private repos
|
| These are separate tool calls. How could the MCP server know
| that they interact at all?
| kiitos wrote:
| I dunno! But if it can't, then it can't allow itself to be
| instantiated in a way that allows these kinds of mixed
| interactions in the first place.
| vel0city wrote:
| The GitHub API could also have the same effects if you
| wired up some other automated tool to hit it with a token
| that can access private and public repos. Is the GitHub API
| also at fault for having the potential for these mixed
| interactions?
|
| Say you had a Jenkins build server and you gave it a token
| which had access to your public and private repos. Someone
| updates a Jenkinsfile which gets executed on PRs to run
| automated tests. They updated it to read from a private
| repo and write it out someplace. Is this the fault of
| Jenkins or the scoping of the access token you gave it?
| kiitos wrote:
| GitHub provides the GitHub MCP server we're discussing
| right now. That tool allows interactions that violate the
| access control constraints defined by GitHub itself.
|
| If you wired up "some other automated tool" to the GitHub
| API, and that tool violated GitHub access control
| constraints, then the problem would be in that tool, and
| obviously not in the API. The API satisfies and enforces
| the access control constraints correctly.
|
| A Jenkins build server has no relationship with, or
| requirement to enforce, any access control constraints
| for any third-party system like GitHub.
| vel0city wrote:
| > violate the access control constraints defined by
| GitHub itself.
|
| I don't see anything defining these access control
| constraints listed by the MCP server documentation. It
| seems pretty obvious to me its just a wrapper around its
| API, not really doing much more than that. Can you show
| me where it says it ensures actions are scoped to the
| same source repo? It can't possibly do so, so I can't
| imagine they'd make such a promise.
|
| GitHub does offer access control constraints. Its with
| the token you generate for the API.
| kiitos wrote:
| The token you provide to the GitHub official MCP server
| determines what that server is allowed to access. But the
| MCP server doesn't just serve requests with responses,
| which is the normal case. It can read private data, and
| then publish that private data to something that is
| outside of the private scope, e.g. is public. This is a
| problem. The system doesn't need to make an explicit
| promise guaranteeing that this kind of stuff isn't valid,
| it's obviously wrong, and it's self-evident that it
| shouldn't be allowed.
| wlamartin wrote:
| I'm not sure whether you're confused, or I'm just having
| a horrible time understanding your point. The MCP server
| really does just serve requests with responses via a
| mechanism that satisfies the MCP spec. The MCP hosts
| (e.g. VSCode) work with an LLM to determine which of
| those tools to call, and ideally work with users via
| confirmation prompts to ensure the user really wants
| those things to happen.
|
| What am I missing?
|
| I do believe there's more that the MCP Server could be
| offering to protect users, but that seems like a separate
| point.
| kiitos wrote:
| Sorry, I probably was being imprecise. You're correct
| that the [GitHub] MCP server really does serve requests
| with responses. But my point was that certain kinds of
| requests (like create_new_pr or whatever) have side
| effects that make mutating calls to third-party systems,
| and the information that can be passed as part of those
| mutating calls to those third-party systems isn't
| guaranteed to satisfy the access control expectations
| that are intuitively expected. Specifically by that I
| mean calling create_new_pr might target a public
| repository, but include a body field with information
| from a private repo. That's a problem and what I'm
| talking about.
| michaelmior wrote:
| The problem is that the MCP server does not know that the
| data being posted is intended to be private. It is
| provided as a separate disconnected API call. Yes, it
| would be possible for GitHub to scan the he contents of a
| request for things they might believe should be private
| but that would be very brittle.
| vel0city wrote:
| How does the MCP server know the content is from a
| private repo?
| yusina wrote:
| > The problem required the user to set up a GitHub MCP server
| with credentials that allowed access to both public and private
| repos, to configure some LLM to have access to that MCP server,
| and then to explicitly submit a request to that LLM that
| explicitly said to read and parse arbitrary issues (including
| the one created earlier) and then just blindly parse and
| process and perform whatever those issues said to do, and then
| blindly make a publicly-visible update to a public repo with
| the results of those operation(s).
|
| To be fair, with all the AI craze, this is exactly what lots of
| people are going to do without thinking twice.
|
| You might say "well they shouldn't, stupid". True. But that's
| what guardrails are for, because people often are stupid.
| lionkor wrote:
| > The problem required the user to set up a GitHub MCP server
| with credentials that allowed access to both public and private
| repos, to configure some LLM to have access to that MCP server
|
| Sounds like something an LLM would suggest you to do :)
| IanCal wrote:
| > and then to explicitly submit a request to that LLM that
| explicitly said to read and parse arbitrary issues (including
| the one created earlier) and then just blindly parse and
| process and perform whatever those issues said to do, and then
| blindly make a publicly-visible update to a public repo with
| the results of those operation(s).
|
| I think you're missing the issue with the latter part.
|
| Prompt injection means that as long as they submit a request to
| the LLM that reads issues (which may be a request as simple as
| "summarise the bugs reported today") the all of the remainder
| can be _instructions in the malicious issue_.
| loveparade wrote:
| TLDR; If you give the agent an access token that has permissions
| to access private repos it can use it to... access private
| repos!?
| cjbprime wrote:
| It's not that nonsensical. After it's accessed the private
| repo, it leaks its content back to the attacker via the public
| repo.
|
| But it's really just (more) indirect prompt injection, again.
| It affects every similar use of LLMs.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Could someone update the TLDR to explain how / why a third
| party was able to inject instructions to Claude? I don't get
| it.
| charles_f wrote:
| Through an issue on the public repo. There's even a screen
| capture of it
| bjornsing wrote:
| So the security mistake was saying to Claude "please
| handle that GitHub issue for me" with auto approve
| enabled?
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| The issue is that anything put into an LLM thread can
| alter the behavior of the LLM thread in significant ways
| (prompt injection) leading to RCE or data exfiltration if
| certain scenarios are met.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| It's as much a vulnerability of the GitHub MCP as SQL injection
| is a vulnerability of MySQL. The vulnerability results from
| trusting unsanitized user input rather than the underlying
| technology.
| username223 wrote:
| How do you sanitize user input to an LLM? You can't!
|
| Programmers aren't even particularly good at escaping strings
| going into SQL queries or HTML pages, despite both operations
| being deterministic and already implemented. The current
| "solution" for LLMs is to scold and beg them as if they're
| humans, then hope that they won't react to some new version of
| "ignore all previous instructions" by ignoring all previous
| instructions.
|
| We experienced decades of security bugs that could have been
| prevented by not mixing code and data, then decided to use a
| program that cannot distinguish between code and data to write
| our code. We deserve everything that's coming.
| zamalek wrote:
| > escaping strings going into SQL
|
| This is not how you mitigate SQL injection (unless you need
| to change which table is being selected from or what-have-
| you). Use parameters.
| babyent wrote:
| You should use parameters but sometimes you need to inject
| application side stuff.
|
| You just need to ensure you're whitelisting the input. You
| cannot let consumers pass in any arbitrary SQL to execute.
|
| Not SQL but I use graph databases a lot and sometimes the
| application side needs to do context lookup to inject node
| names. Cannot use params and the application throws if the
| check fails.
| protocolture wrote:
| >How do you sanitize user input to an LLM? You can't!
|
| Then probably dont give it access to your privileged data?
| drkrab wrote:
| Interesting. When you give a third-party access to your GitHub
| repositories, you also have to trust that the third-party
| implements all of GitHub's security policies. This must be very
| hard to actually assume.
| godelski wrote:
| I feel like the real problem is we're telling people to put their
| stuff in a safe but a post-it note with the combination on the
| side.
|
| So I feel weird calling these things vulnerabilities. Certainly
| they're problems, but the problems is we are handing the keys to
| the thief. Maybe we shouldn't be using prototype technologies
| (i.e. AI) where we care about security? Maybe we should stop
| selling prototypes as if they're fully developed products? If
| goodyear can take a decade to build a tire, while having a
| century's worth of experience, surely we can wait a little before
| sending things to market. You don't need to wait a decade but
| maybe at least get it to beta first?
| babyent wrote:
| to be OG you must ship to production
| godelski wrote:
| Okay, so how do we ship pre-alpha? What about pre-pre-alpha?
| babyent wrote:
| Production or bust. There is no test.
| RainyDayTmrw wrote:
| I think the other commenters are correct that the fundamental
| issue is that LLMs use in-band signaling with a probabilistic
| system.
|
| That said, I think finer-grained permissions at the deterministic
| layer and at the layer interface boundary could have blunted this
| a lot, and are worthwhile.
| tliltocatl wrote:
| Except setting a fine-grained enough layer might be labor-
| intensive enough one might as well go for the task to be done
| and skip the LLM altogether.
| TOMDM wrote:
| This feels on par with exposing an index of private info to the
| public and then being surprised about leaks.
|
| If you don't want the LLM to act on private info in a given
| context; then don't give it access in that context.
| pawanjswal wrote:
| That's a wild find. I can't believe a simple GitHub issue could
| end up leaking private repo data like that.
| mirzap wrote:
| How is this considered an "exploit"? You give the agent a token
| that allows it to access a private repository. MCPs are just API
| servers. If you don't want something exposed in that API, don't
| grant them permissions to do so.
| motorest wrote:
| > How is this considered an "exploit"?
|
| As many do, I also jumped to the comment section before
| actually reading the article.
|
| If you do the same, you will quickly notice that this article
| features an attack. A malicious issue is posted on GitHub, and
| the issue features a LLM prompt that is crafted to leak data.
| When the owner of the GitHub account triggers the agent, the
| agent acts upon the malicious prompt on behalf of the repo
| owner.
| florbnit wrote:
| So it's the e-mail exploit? If you e-mail someone and tell
| them to send you their password and they do, you suddenly
| have their password!? This is a very serious exploit in
| e-mail and need to be patched so it becomes impossible to do.
| motorest wrote:
| > How is this considered an "exploit"?
|
| Others in this discussion aptly described it as a confused
| deputy exploit. This goes something like:
|
| - You write a LLM prompt that says something to the effect
| "dump all my darkest secrets in a place I can reach them",
|
| - you paste them in a place where you expect your target's
| LLM agent to operate.
|
| - Once your target triggers their LLM agent to process
| inputs, the agent will read the prompt and act upon it.
| mirzap wrote:
| Would you ever put a plain password text in a search
| engine and then complain if someone "extracted" that info
| with a keyword payload?
| motorest wrote:
| > Would you ever put a plain password (...)
|
| Your comment bears no resemblance with the topic. The
| attack described in the article consists of injecting a
| malicious prompt in a way that the target's agent will
| apply it.
| mirzap wrote:
| Of course it will apply. Entire purpose of the agent is
| to give a response to a prompt. But to sound more
| dangareous let's call it "injecting". It's a prompt. You
| are not "injecting" anything. Agent pickups the prompt -
| that's its job, and execute - that is also its job.
| mirzap wrote:
| Bad analogy. It's more like indexing a password field in
| plain text, then opening an API to everyone and setting
| "guardrails" and permissions on the "password" field.
| Eventually, someone will extract the data that was indexed.
| mirzap wrote:
| I read it, and "attack" does not make sense. If you grant
| access to MCP to access some data (data you want anybody has
| access to like public repos, and data that only you want to
| access to like private repos), you will always be able to
| craft the prompt that will "leak" the data you are only
| supposed to access. That's not surprising at all. The only
| way to prevent these kind of "leaks" is not to provide the
| data feed with private data to the agent.
| motorest wrote:
| > I read it, and "attack" does not make sense.
|
| Do you believe that describe a SQL injection attack an
| attack also does not make sense?
| mirzap wrote:
| That's the thing. LLM or MCP is not a database. You can't
| compare it. You simply can't set the permissions or
| guardrails within LLMs or MCPs. You always do it layer
| above (scoping to what LLM has access to).
| motorest wrote:
| > That's the thing. LLM or MCP is not a database. You
| can't compare it.
|
| You can. Read the article. A malicious prompt is injected
| into an issue to trigger the repo owner's LLM agent to
| execute it with the agent's credentials.
| mirzap wrote:
| "with the agent's credentials." - so you are surprised
| that agent can respond with private repository details
| when it has access to it? WoW! anyone and anything with
| credentials can access it. Github action, Jenkins, me.
|
| "injected" is so fancy word to describe prompting - one
| thing that LLMs are made to do - respond to a prompt.
| dylanfw wrote:
| The "surprise" is not that the agent can respond with
| private repository details, it's that it can receive and
| act upon prompts issued by someone other than the person
| running the agent, hence "prompt _injection_".
|
| Or to come back to the SQL injection analogy, no one is
| surprised that the web app can query the database for
| password hashes. The surprise is that it can be
| instructed to do so when loading the next image in a
| carousel.
| mirzap wrote:
| @motorest read again what I wrote: "That's the thing. LLM
| or MCP is not a database. You can't compare it. You
| simply can't set the permissions or guardrails within
| LLMs or MCPs. You always do it layer above (scoping to
| what LLM has access to)."
|
| You can not HIDE the data MCP has access to. With a
| database and SQL, you can! So it can not be comparable
| with SQL injection.
| frabcus wrote:
| Absolutly you can - the UX of the whole experience MCP is
| part of could make it clear to the user what repositories
| can be accessed according to the project they're working
| on. Rather than when they're working on the public
| project, the LLM being given access to repos of the
| private projects.
| krisoft wrote:
| > That's not surprising at all
|
| An attack doesn't have to be surprising to be an attack.
|
| > The only way to prevent these kind of "leaks" is not to
| provide the data feed with private data to the agent.
|
| Yes. That is exactly what the article recommends as a
| mitigation.
| mirzap wrote:
| > An attack doesn't have to be surprising to be an
| attack.
|
| If you open an API to everyone, or put a password as
| plain text and index it, it's no surprise that someone
| accesses the "sensitive" data. Nor do I consider that an
| attack.
|
| You simply can't feed the LLM the data, or grant it
| access to the data, then try to mitigate the risk by
| setting "guardrails" on the LLM itself. There WILL ALWAYS
| be a prompt to extract any data LLM has access to.
|
| > Yes. That is exactly what the article recommends as a
| mitigation.
|
| That's common sense, not mitigation. Expecting "security
| experts" to recommend that is like expecting a
| recommendation to always hash the password before storing
| it in the DB. Common sense. Obvious.
| Xelynega wrote:
| I don't understand your logic. Should security reports
| never be published that say "hash the password before
| storing it in the DB". Boring research is boring most of
| the time, that doesn't make it unimportant, no?
| mirzap wrote:
| No, but it's not the database's fault if you don't hash
| your password. Same here, it's human error, not "MCP
| vulnerability". It's not that GitHub MCP needs fixing,
| but rather how you use it. That's the entire point of my
| reasoning for this "exploit."
| krisoft wrote:
| > it's no surprise
|
| The amount of your surprise is not a factor weather it is
| an attack or not.
|
| You have been already asked about sql injections. Do you
| consider them attacks?
|
| They are very similar. You concatenate an untrusted
| string with an sql query, and execute the resulting
| string on the database. Of course you are going to have
| problems. This is absolutely unsuprising and yet we still
| call it an attack. Somehow people manage to fall into
| that particular trap again and again.
|
| Tell me which one is the case: do you not consider sql
| injection attacks attacks, or do you consider them
| somehow more surprising than this one?
|
| > That's common sense, not mitigation.
|
| Something can be both. Locking your front door is a
| mitigation against opportunistic burglars, and at the
| same time is just common sense.
|
| > Expecting "security experts" to recommend that is like
| expecting a recommendation to always hash the password
| before storing it in the DB.
|
| That is actually a real world security advice. And in
| fact if you recall it is one many many websites were not
| implementing for very long times. So seemingly it was
| less common sense for some than it is for you. And even
| then you can implement it badly vs implement it
| correctly. (When i started in this business a single MD5
| hash of the password was often recommended, then later
| people started talking about salting the hash, and even
| later people started talking about how MD5 is entirely
| too weak and you really ought to use something like
| bcrypt if you want to do it right.) Is all of that detail
| common sense too? Did you sprung into existence fully
| formed with the full knowledge of all of that, or had you
| had to think for a few seconds before you reinvented
| bcrypt on your own?
|
| > Common sense. Obvious.
|
| Good! Excelent. It was common sense and obvious to you.
| That means you are all set. Nothing for you to mitigate,
| because you already did. I guess you can move on and do
| the next genious thing while people less fortunate than
| you patch their workflows. Onward and upward!
| mirzap wrote:
| In principle, I agree with you. The problem I have with
| articles like this and people commenting is that it's
| framed as if MCP's vulnerability is discovered, that MCP
| "needs fixing." When it's not. It's not the database's
| fault if you don't hash your password - it's yours.
| frabcus wrote:
| It's a fundamental user experience flaw with the MCP
| server. It does indeed need fixing - e.g. it could have a
| permissions system itself, so even if the GitHub token
| has permissions, different projects have their tool calls
| filtered to reduce access to different repos. Or it could
| have a clearer UX and instructions and help making
| multiple tokens for the different use cases. The MCP
| server could check the token permissions and refuse to
| run until they're granular.
| motorest wrote:
| > The problem I have with articles like this and people
| commenting is that it's framed as if MCP's vulnerability
| (...)
|
| You're extrapolating. The problem is clearly described as
| a MCP exploit, not a vulnerability. You're the only one
| talking about vulnerabilities. The system is vulnerable
| to this exploit.
| mirzap wrote:
| It's not even an exploit. MCP is doing what it is MADE TO
| DO. It's made for interacting with the GitHub API.
| Whatever it has access to, it will access. If it has
| access to delete the repo, it will delete the repo. If it
| has access to the private repo, it will access the
| private repo.
| ljm wrote:
| At a high level I think it's still appropriate to
| question the role MCP is playing, even if you can still
| blame AI enthusiasts for being cavalier in their approach
| to installing MCP servers and giving them blanket
| permissions.
|
| The more people keep doing it and getting burned, the
| more it's going to force the issue and both the MCP spec
| and server authors are going to have to respond.
| mirzap wrote:
| The role is very simple. It provides an interface for the
| AI to access the data. Whatever it has access to (via
| MCP), it will access. Simple as that.
| jsrozner wrote:
| SQL attack is different. There's clearly zero expectation
| that someone can, for example, enter something on a web
| page and extract database info or modify the database
| beyond what was intended by the API (e.g., update a
| single record).
|
| If you are working in an organization and you tell a
| junior coder "do everything on this list" and on the list
| is something that says "do something to some other list"
| and the junior coder does it...that's a fundamentally
| different kind of "bug". Maybe you expected that the
| junior coder should say "oh hmm, it's weird that
| something in this repo mentions another repo" but in that
| case, you can imagine a high level todo list that points
| to other low level todo lists, where you would want the
| junior coder to proceed. Maybe you're looking for "common
| sense" where there is none?
|
| Actual organizations have ways to mitigate this. For
| example, OWNERs files would prevent someone from
| committing code to a repo of which they are not an OWNER
| without review. And then we're back to what many in these
| comments have proposed: you should not have given the
| agent access to another repo if you didn't want it to do
| something in that repo after you told it--albeit
| indirectly--to do something in that repo...
|
| -- Actually, arguably a better analogy is that you go to
| share a file with someone in, e.g., Google Drive. You
| share a folder and inadvertently grant them access to a
| subfolder that you didn't want to share. If, in sharing
| the folder, you say "hey please revise some docs" and
| then somehow something in the subfolder gets modified,
| that's not a bug. That's you sharing a thing you weren't
| supposed to share. So this automatic detection pipeline
| can maybe detect where you intended to share X but
| actually shared X and Y.
| raesene9 wrote:
| The key is, it's not the person who grants the MCP access
| who is the attacker.
|
| The attacker is some other person who can create issues on
| a public Repo but has no direct access to the private repo.
| mirzap wrote:
| The point is this is NOT a GitHub MCP vulnerability, but
| how you use it. There is nothing to be fixed in MCP
| itself; rather how you use it.
| motorest wrote:
| > The point is this is NOT a GitHub MCP vulnerability,
| but how you use it.
|
| You're the only one talking about GitHub MCP
| vulnerabilities. Everyone else is talking about GitHub
| MCP exploits. It's in the title, even.
| mirzap wrote:
| Tomato-Tomato. It's not even an exploit. I will give you
| my token with access only to public repos. Try and access
| my private repos with Github MCP. Guess what - you can't
| - so it is not Github MCP exploit.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Not surprising to you, but surprising to thousands of users
| who will not think about this, or who will have believed
| the marketing promises.
| mirzap wrote:
| Well I saw vibe coders commit .env files with real
| credentials to public repository, but I didn't see anyone
| blaming Git for allowing .env or secrets to be commited
| in the first place.
| sam-cop-vimes wrote:
| This "exploits" human fallibility, hence it is an exploit. The
| fallibility being users blindly buying into the hype and
| granting full access to their private Github repos thinking it
| is safe.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| I'm going to be rather pedantic here given the seriousness of
| the topic. It's important that everyone understand how risky
| running a tool executing AI is, exactly.
|
| Agents run various tools based on their current attention. That
| attention can be affected by the tool results from the tools
| they ran. I've even noted they alter the way they run tools by
| giving them a "personality" up front. However, you seem to
| argue otherwise, that it is the user's fault for giving it the
| ability to access the information to begin with, not the way it
| reads information as it is running.
|
| This makes me think of several manipulative tactics to argue
| for something that is an irrational thought:
|
| Stubborn argumentation despite clear explanations: Multiple
| people explained the confused deputy problem and why this
| constitutes an exploit, but you kept circling back to the same
| flawed argument that "you gave access so it's your fault." This
| raises questions about why argue this way. Maybe you are
| confused, maybe you have a horse in the game that is
| threatened.
|
| Moving goalposts: When called out on terminology, you shift
| from saying it's not an "attack" to saying it's not a
| "vulnerability" to saying it's not "MCP's fault" - constantly
| reframing rather than engaging with the actual technical issues
| being raised. It is definitely MCP's fault that it gives access
| without any consideration on limiting that access later with
| proper tooling or logging. I had my MCP stuff turn on massive
| logging, so at least I can see how stuff goes wrong when it
| does.
|
| Dismissive attitude toward security research: You characterized
| legitimate security findings as "common sense" and seemed
| annoyed that researchers would document and publish this type
| of exploit, missing the educational value. It can _never_ be
| wrong to talk about security. It may be that the premise is
| weak, or the threat minimal, but it cannot be that it 's the
| user's fault.
|
| False analogies: you kept using analogies that didn't match the
| actual attack vector (like putting passwords in search engines)
| while rejecting apt comparisons like SQL injection. In fact,
| this is almost exactly like SQL injection and nobody argues
| this way for that when it's discussed. Little Bobby Tables
| lives on.
|
| Inability to grasp indirection: You seem fundamentally unable
| to understand that the issue isn't direct access abuse, but
| rather a third party manipulating the system to gain
| unauthorized access - by posting an issue to a public Github.
| This suggests either a genuine conceptual blind spot or willful
| obtuseness. It's a real concern if my AI does something it
| shouldn't when it runs a tool based on another tools output.
| And, I would say that everyone recommending it should only run
| one tool like this at a time is huffing Elmers.
|
| Defensive rather than curious: Instead of trying to understand
| why multiple knowledgeable people disagreed with them, you
| doubled down and became increasingly defensive. This caused
| massive amounts of posting, so we know for sure that your
| comment was polarizing.
|
| I suppose I'm not suppose to go meta on here, but I frequently
| do because I'm passionate about these things and also just a
| little bit odd enough to not give a shit what anyone thinks.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| There's a random comment the LLM makes about "excluding
| minesweeper as requested", I'm curious where that comes from! It
| doesn't seem to be from the LLM user's session or the malicious
| issue.
|
| Is there a private repo called minesweeper that has some
| instruction in its readme that is causing it to be excluded?
| lbeurerkellner wrote:
| We have published the full trace, with tool outputs here now:
| https://explorer.invariantlabs.ai/trace/5f3f3f3c-edd3-4ba7-a...
|
| The minesweeper comment was caused by the issue containing
| explicit instructions in the version that the agent actually
| ran on. The issue was mistakenly edited afterwards to remove
| that part, but you can check the edit history in the test repo
| here: https://github.com/ukend0464/pacman/issues/1
|
| The agent ran on the unedited issue, with the explicit request
| to exclude the minesweeper repo (another repo of the same
| user).
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| Thanks, that makes sense! Cool explorer too!
| jogu wrote:
| Is there any reason that this attack is limited to the GitHub MCP
| or could it be applied to others as well?
|
| For example, even if the GitHub MCP server only had access to the
| single public repository, could the agent be convinced to
| exfiltrate information from some other arbitrary MCP sever
| configured in the environment to that repository?
| lbeurerkellner wrote:
| Yes, any MCP server that is connected to an untrusted source of
| data, could be abused by an attacker to take over the agent.
| Here, we just showed an in-server exploit, that does not
| require more than one server.
|
| Also, check out our work on tool poisoning, where a connected
| server itself turns malicious
| (https://invariantlabs.ai/blog/mcp-security-notification-
| tool...).
| nssnsjsjsjs wrote:
| Yep I could wrote a prompt here in this very comment to trick
| an LLM and then dump in a URL to exfiltrate and hopefully
| someone has a tool that unthinkingly posts to that endpoint.
| lbeurerkellner wrote:
| One of the authors here. Thanks for posting. If you are
| interested in learning more about MCP and agent security, check
| out some of the following resources, that we have created since
| we started working on this:
|
| * The full execution trace of the Claude session in this attack
| scenario:
| https://explorer.invariantlabs.ai/trace/5f3f3f3c-edd3-4ba7-a...
|
| * MCP-Scan, A security scanner for MCP connections:
| https://github.com/invariantlabs-ai/mcp-scan
|
| * MCP Tool Poisoning Attacks, https://invariantlabs.ai/blog/mcp-
| security-notification-tool...
|
| * WhatsApp MCP Exploited, https://invariantlabs.ai/blog/whatsapp-
| mcp-exploited
|
| * Guardrails, a contextual security layer for agents,
| https://invariantlabs.ai/blog/guardrails
|
| * AgentDojo, Jointly evaluate security and utility of AI agents
| https://invariantlabs.ai/blog/agentdojo
| lionkor wrote:
| I think most commenters are really missing the point. This is not
| a "maybe" possible attack that only works if the stars align.
| This is "if you follow the AI hype and use this tool naiively,
| anyone can access your private repos".
|
| This is a security vulnerability. This is an attack. If I leave
| my back door unlocked, it's still a burglary when someone walks
| in and takes everything I own. That doesn't mean that suddenly
| "it's not an attack".
|
| This is victim blaming, nothing else. You cannot expect people to
| use hyped AI tools and _also_ know _anything_ about _anything_.
| People following the AI hype and giving full access to AIs are
| still people, even if they lack a healthy risk assessment. They
| 're going to get hurt by this, and you saying "its not an attack"
| isn't going to make that any better.
|
| The reality is that the agent should only have the permissions
| and accesses of the person writing the request.
| lbeurerkellner wrote:
| I agree. It is also interesting to consider how AI security,
| user eduction/posture and social engineering relate. It is not
| traditional security in the sense of a code vulnerability, but
| is is a real vulnerability that can be exploited to harm users.
| nicce wrote:
| We should handle LLMs as insider threat instead of typical
| input parsing problem and we get much better.
| nssnsjsjsjs wrote:
| All text input is privileged code basically. There is no
| delimiting possible.
| nssnsjsjsjs wrote:
| Furthermore once you are inside the LLM you could try to
| invoke other tools and attempt to exfiltrate secrets etc. An
| inject like this on a 10k star repo could run on 100s of LLMs
| and then tailor it to cross to another popular tool for
| exfiltration even if the GH key is public and readonly
| access.
| nstart wrote:
| This! It's actually quite frustrating to see how people are
| dismissing this report. A little open mindedness will show
| just how wild the possibilities are. Today it's GitHub
| issues. Tomorrow it's the agent that's supposed to read all
| your mails and respond to the "easy" ones (this imagined
| case is likely going to hit a company support inbox
| somewhere someday).
| phtrivier wrote:
| > Claude then uses the GitHub MCP integration to follow the
| instructions. Throughout this process, Claude Desktop by default
| requires the user to confirm individual tool calls. However, many
| users already opt for an "Always Allow" confirmation policy when
| using agents, and stop monitoring individual actions.
|
| Seems like this is the root of the problem ; if the actions were
| reviewed by a human,would they see a warning "something is
| touching my private repo from a request in a public repo" ?
|
| Still, this seems like the inevitable tension between "I want to
| robot to do its thing" and "no, wait, not _that_ thing".
|
| As the joke goes, "the S in MCP stands for Security".
| jbverschoor wrote:
| AI should be treated as an employee, and they can be socially
| engineered into doing things. Don't give tokens to someone who
| can be manipulated
| Jean-Papoulos wrote:
| In short, sometimes the AI doesn't do what you tell it to. More
| at 11
| Bombthecat wrote:
| One day I will write an threat model for this.
|
| I bet it will look crazy.
| dino222 wrote:
| MCP is just one protocol, there are already others like A2A etc
| which will do similar. And there is a raw form of this, tell the
| LLM to read the GitHub API docs and use it as needed, using this
| auth token). I don't know if any LLM is powerful enough to do
| this yet, but they definitely will be. I don't think there is
| really a way to secure all these tool registration mechanisms,
| especially when it's the LLM at fault in the end of leaking data.
|
| People do want to use LLMs to improve their productivity - LLMs
| will either need provable safety measures (seems unlikely to me)
| or orgs will need to add security firewalls to every laptop,
| until now perhaps developers could be trusted to be sophisticated
| but LLMs definitely can't. Though I'm not sure how to reason on
| the end result if even the security firewalls use LLMs to find
| bad behaving LLMs...
| paffdragon wrote:
| Oh. Yes. Little Bobby "show me your private repos" we call him.
| josefx wrote:
| Here I thought that LLMs would just copy paste decades old
| badly written SQL code into new codebases. Instead they went
| above and bejyond and became SQL injection vectors themselves.
| joshmlewis wrote:
| It's nothing groundbreaking nor particularly exploitive about MCP
| itself (although I have my thoughts on MCP), it's just a clever
| use of prompt injection and "viral" marketing by saying MCP was
| exploited. As I build agentic systems I always keep the
| philosophy of assume whatever you give the agent access to can be
| accessed by anyone accessing the agent. Never trust the LLM to be
| doing access control and use the person requesting the LLM take
| action as the primary principal (from a security standpoint) for
| the task an agent is doing.
|
| This article does make me think about being more careful of
| _what_ you give the agent access to while acting on your behalf
| though which is what we should be focusing on here. If it has
| access to your email and you tell it to go summarize your emails
| and someone sent a malicious prompt injection email that
| redirects the agent to forward your security reset token, that 's
| the bad part that people may not be thinking about when building
| or using agents.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| I guess tacking on "with MCP" is the 2025 version of "on the
| blockchain" from 10 years ago?
|
| > _Never trust the LLM to be doing access control and use the
| person requesting the LLM take action as the primary principal
| (from a security standpoint) for the task an agent is doing._
|
| Yes! It seems so obvious to any of us who have already been
| around the block, but I suppose a whole new generation will
| need to learn the principle of least privilege.
| fullstackchris wrote:
| ITT: access tokens really work!
|
| Really a waste of time topic but "interesting" I suppose for
| people who don't understand the tools themselves
| aa-jv wrote:
| I've noticed you can also get Grok to tell you about comments on
| threads from people who have blocked you.
|
| Seems like AI is introducing all kinds of strange edge cases that
| have to be accommodated in modern permissions systems ..
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Exploitive MCP that probably already exists in the wild: build
| crypto trading MCP that drains your wallet into my wallet.
| JoshMandel wrote:
| Last week I tried Google's Jules coding agent and saw it
| requested broad GitHub OAuth permissions --essentially "full
| access to everything your account can do." When you authorize it,
| you're granting access to all your repositories.
|
| This is partly driven by developer convenience on the agent side,
| but it's also driven by GitHub OAuth flow. It should be easier to
| create a downscoped approval during authorization that still
| allows the app to request additional access later. It should be
| easy to let an agent submit an authorization request scoped to a
| specific repository, etc.
|
| Instead, I had to create a companion GitHub account
| (https://github.com/jmandel-via-jules) with explicit access only
| to the repositories and permissions I want Jules to touch. It's
| pretty inconvenient but I don't see another way to safely use
| these agents without potentially exposing everything.
|
| GitHub does endorse creating "machine users" as dedicated
| accounts for applications, which validates this approach, but it
| shouldn't be necessary for basic repository scoping.
|
| Please let me know if there is an easier way that Ip'm just
| missing.
| abraham wrote:
| You can go to https://github.com/settings/installations and
| edit Jules permissions to be limited to a specific list of
| repos.
| varispeed wrote:
| Is this blog convoluted on purpose to hide it's a nothingburger?
| username223 wrote:
| > Anything that combines those three capabilities will leave you
| open to attacks, and the attacks don't even need to be
| particularly sophisticated to get through.
|
| "...don't even need to be particularly sophisticated..."
|
| This stuff just drives me insane. How many decades will it take
| to mostly mitigate the "sophisticated" attacks? Having three
| different ways to end lines ("\n", "\r\n", and "\r") caused years
| of subtle bugs, and buffer overflows are still causing them, yet
| we're thinking about using this thing to write code? It's all so
| stupid and predictable...
| linkage wrote:
| Not to downplay the severity of this exploit, but MCP is not the
| problem here. The attack works just as well if the MCP client is
| able to execute the GitHub CLI (e.g. Cursor and VS Code). The
| actual attack is simply prompt injection.
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