[HN Gopher] All I Want for Christmas Is Your Secrets: LangGrinch...
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All I Want for Christmas Is Your Secrets: LangGrinch hits LangChain
Core
Author : shahartal
Score : 51 points
Date : 2025-12-25 18:06 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cyata.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (cyata.ai)
| shahartal wrote:
| CVE-2025-68664 ( _langchain-core_ ): object confusion during
| (de)serialization can leak secrets (and in some cases escalate
| further). Details and mitigations in the post.
| nubg wrote:
| WHY on earth did the author of the CVE feel the need to feed the
| description text through an LLm? I get dizzy when I see this AI
| slop style.
|
| I would rather just read the original prompt that went in instead
| of verbosified "it's not X, it's **Y**!" slop.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > WHY on earth did the author of the CVE feel the need to feed
| the description text through an LLm?
|
| Not everyone speaks English natively.
|
| Not everyone has taste when it comes to written English.
| nubg wrote:
| If I want to cleanup, summarize, translate, make more formal,
| make more funny, whatever, some incoming text by sending it
| through an LLM, I can do it myself.
| crote wrote:
| I would rather read succinct English written by a non-native
| speaker filled with broken grammar than overly verbose but
| well-spelled AI slop. Heck, just share the prompt itself!
|
| If you can't be bothered to have a human write literally a
| handful of lines of text, what else can't you be bothered to
| do? Why should I trust that your CVE even exists at all - let
| alone is indeed "critical" and worth ruining Christmas over?
| iinnPP wrote:
| I prefer reading the LLM output for accessibility reasons.
|
| More importantly though, the sheer amount of this complaint
| on HN has become a great reason not to show up.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Unfortunately, the sheer amount of ChatGPT-processed
| texts being linked has for me become a reason not to want
| to read them, which is quite depressing.
| crote wrote:
| > I prefer reading the LLM output for accessibility
| reasons.
|
| And that's completely fine! If you prefer to read CVEs
| that way, nobody is going to stop you from piping all CVE
| descriptions you're interested in through a LLM.
|
| However, having it processed by a LLM is essentially a
| one-way operation. If some people prefer the original and
| some others prefer the LLM output, the obvious move is to
| share the _original_ with the world and have LLM-
| preferring readers do the processing on _their_ end. That
| way everyone is happy with the format they get to read.
| Sounds like a win-win, no?
| iinnPP wrote:
| Yes, framed as you stated it is indeed a win-win.
|
| However, there will be cases where lacking the LLM
| output, there isn't any output at all.
|
| Creating a stigma over technology which is easily
| observed as being, in some form, accessible is expected
| in the world we live. As it is on HN.
|
| Not to say you are being any type of anything, I just
| don't believe anyone has given it all that much thought.
| I read the complaints and can't distinguish them from
| someone complaining that they need to make some space for
| a blind person using their accessibility tools.
| colechristensen wrote:
| You wouldn't complain as much if it were merely poorly
| written by a human. It gets the information across. The
| novelty of complaining about a new style of bad writing is
| being overdone by a lot of people, particularly on HN.
| dorianmariecom wrote:
| you can use chatgpt to reverse the prompt
| XCSme wrote:
| Not sure if it's a joke, but I don't think LLM is a bijective
| function.
| small_scombrus wrote:
| ChatGPT can generate you a sentence that plausibly looks like
| the prompt
| prodigycorp wrote:
| The best part about this is that you know the type of
| people/companies using langchain are likely the type that are not
| going to patch this in a timely manner.
| wilkystyle wrote:
| Can you elaborate? Fairly new to langchain, but didn't realize
| it had any sort of stereotypical type of user.
| XCSme wrote:
| I am not sure what's the stereotype, but I tried using
| langchain and realised most of the functionality actually
| adds more code to use than simply writing my own direct API
| LLM calls.
|
| Overall I felt like it solves a problem doesn't exist, and
| I've been happily sending direct API calls for years to LLMs
| without issues.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| JSON Structured Output from OpenAI was released a year
| after the first LangChain release.
|
| I think structured output with schema validation mostly
| replaces the need for complex prompt frameworks. I do look
| at the LC source from time to time because they do have
| good prompts backed into the framework.
| majormajor wrote:
| IME you could get reliable JSON or other easily-parsable
| output formats out of OpenAI's going back at least to
| GPT3.5 or 4 in early 2023. I think that was a bit after
| LangChain's release but I don't recall hitting problems
| that I needed to add a layer around in order to do
| "agent"-y things ("dispatch this to this specialized
| other prompt-plus-chatgpt-api-call, get back structured
| data, dispatch it to a different specialized prompt-plus-
| chatgpt-api-call") before it was a buzzword.
| prodigycorp wrote:
| No dig at you, but I take the average langchain user as one
| who is either a) using it because their C-suite heard about
| at some AI conference and had it foisted upon them or b) does
| not care about software quality in general.
|
| I've talked to many people who regret building on top of it
| but they're in too deep.
|
| I think you may come to the same conclusions over time.
| inlustra wrote:
| Great insight that you wouldn't get without HN, thank you!
| What would you and your peers recommend?
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| LangChain does not solve any actual problem, so there is
| no need to replace it with anything. Just build without
| it.
| int_19h wrote:
| I'll admit that I haven't looked it in a while, but as
| originally released, it was a textbook example on how to
| complicate a fundamentally simple and well-understood task
| (text templates, basically) with lots of useless abstractions
| that made it all sound more "enterprise". People would write
| complicated langchains, but then when you looked under the
| hood all it was doing is some string concatenation, and the
| result was actually less readable than a simple template with
| substitutions in it.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Yep, not sure why anyone is using it still.
| threecheese wrote:
| Cheers to all the teams on sev1 calls on their holidays, we can
| only hope their adversaries are also trying to spend time with
| family. LangGrinch, indeed! (I get it, timely disclosure is
| responsible disclosure)
| nextworddev wrote:
| Meanwhile Harrison Chase is laughing his way to the bank
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