4 ms·

It's not a good use case for anything. Never ask a remote endpoint that's not owned by you and not run by you, what commands you should run on your system. Cer

It's not a good use case for anything. Never ask a remote endpoint that's not owned by you and not run by you, what commands you should run on your system. Certainly don't execute the answers.

rezonant 2y ago
If we can't let ChatGPT take the wheel, how will we feel alive?
dheera 2y ago
I do envision training a local LLM which would mostly resolve this concern, but at the moment the vast majority of people don't have a good enough GPU in their system to run an even mildly-competent code generation LLM, but I imagine this will change within a few years.
lucianbr 2y ago
99.9999% of the code running on my machine is written by others and not even readable to me. I'm pretty optimistic that a similar percentage is true on your machines. So yeah, we run remote commands all the time, all of us. There may be a subtle difference between "curl something | bash" and "apt-get install" or "setup.exe", but there is no fundamental one.
- broken-kebab 2y ago
  There's a difference between getting code from a repo, and from AI generator though. We can apply an ancient thing known as "reputation" to the former. Not yet to the latter.
- amiga386 2y ago
  Fundamentally: 1. the packages being worked on by Debian et al have a huge pile of infrastructure so that their development happens collaboratively and in the open, with many eyes watching 2. everyone gets the same packages 3. they have their own security teams to _ensure_ everyone is getting the same packages, i.e. that their download servers and checksums haven't been compromised 4. the project has been been working since 1993 to ensure their update system, and the system delivered by those updates, works as expected. If it doesn't, there are IRC channels, mailing lists, bug trackers and a pile of humans to discuss issues with, and if they agree it's a bug, they can fix it for everyone It's not to say it's impossible to sneak an attack past a project dedicated to stopping such attacks, but it's so much more work compared to attacking someone who executes whatever a remote endpoint tells them
  - tucosan 2y ago
    There have been many documented cases of supply chain attacks of various degrees of sophistication. Some of them successful, some of them almost successful. May I remind you of the recent xz vulnerability was discovered by a single dev by mere chance. As an end user it is nearly impossible to guard against such an attack. It can be problematic to run something like `curl foo.com | bash` without inspection of the script first. But even here it makes a difference if you are curling from a project like brew.sh that delivers such script from a TLS protected endpoint or some random script you find somewhere in a gist. Same goes for output from an LLM. You can simply investigate the generated command before executing it. Another strategy might be to only generate the parameters and just pass those to the ffmpeg executable.
    - amiga386 2y ago
      > Same goes for output from an LLM This is the crux of our disagreement. It does not go the same. You have no idea what the LLM is going to write, neither does the LLM, nor the people who created the LLM. At no point did the people who created the LLM actually think about your use-case, nor did the LLM, and there is no promise of anything you ask getting a correct, or even consistent answer. The creators don't know how the answers got there, and can't easily fix them if they're wrong. You'd be a fool to trust it for anything other than dog and pony shows.
      - tucosan 2y ago
        > This is the crux of our disagreement. No it's not. There is an observable and testable probability that an LLMs output is correct or false. There is an observable and testable probability that code created by humans is erroneous. There is a third category where human code is malicious. You will need to guard against all three cases. Guarding against a possibly faulty LLM output that is passed to ffmpeg is significantly easier to realise through defensive prompting and simple sanitization techniques, than to protect against a malicious state actor that is capable of crafting sophisticated supply chain attacks that took years to develop and roll out (again see the xz backdoor). The idea that you can blindly trust an open source project just because "their development happens collaboratively and in the open" is naive. Some open source projects people are building their whole infrastructure on are maintained by a single developer in their spare time. The attack surface is huge and has been exploited time and time again. Just because a project like Debian has signed packages and a security team doesn't guarantee that the underlying code doesn't have some malicious backdoor or some grave bug that creates a big attack surface.
asddubs 2y ago
got it, never do apt-get upgrade
madeofpalk 2y ago
You never search for documentation? From either a first or third party site?

It's not a good use case for anything. Never ask a remote endpoint that's not owned by you and not run by you, what commands you should run on your system. Certainly don't execute the answers.

rezonant 2y ago

If we can't let ChatGPT take the wheel, how will we feel alive?

dheera 2y ago

I do envision training a local LLM which would mostly resolve this concern, but at the moment the vast majority of people don't have a good enough GPU in their system to run an even mildly-competent code generation LLM, but I imagine this will change within a few years.

lucianbr 2y ago

99.9999% of the code running on my machine is written by others and not even readable to me. I'm pretty optimistic that a similar percentage is true on your machines. So yeah, we run remote commands all the time, all of us. There may be a subtle difference between "curl something | bash" and "apt-get install" or "setup.exe", but there is no fundamental one.

broken-kebab 2y ago
There's a difference between getting code from a repo, and from AI generator though. We can apply an ancient thing known as "reputation" to the former. Not yet to the latter.
amiga386 2y ago
Fundamentally: 1. the packages being worked on by Debian et al have a huge pile of infrastructure so that their development happens collaboratively and in the open, with many eyes watching 2. everyone gets the same packages 3. they have their own security teams to _ensure_ everyone is getting the same packages, i.e. that their download servers and checksums haven't been compromised 4. the project has been been working since 1993 to ensure their update system, and the system delivered by those updates, works as expected. If it doesn't, there are IRC channels, mailing lists, bug trackers and a pile of humans to discuss issues with, and if they agree it's a bug, they can fix it for everyone It's not to say it's impossible to sneak an attack past a project dedicated to stopping such attacks, but it's so much more work compared to attacking someone who executes whatever a remote endpoint tells them
- tucosan 2y ago
  There have been many documented cases of supply chain attacks of various degrees of sophistication. Some of them successful, some of them almost successful. May I remind you of the recent xz vulnerability was discovered by a single dev by mere chance. As an end user it is nearly impossible to guard against such an attack. It can be problematic to run something like `curl foo.com | bash` without inspection of the script first. But even here it makes a difference if you are curling from a project like brew.sh that delivers such script from a TLS protected endpoint or some random script you find somewhere in a gist. Same goes for output from an LLM. You can simply investigate the generated command before executing it. Another strategy might be to only generate the parameters and just pass those to the ffmpeg executable.
  - amiga386 2y ago
    > Same goes for output from an LLM This is the crux of our disagreement. It does not go the same. You have no idea what the LLM is going to write, neither does the LLM, nor the people who created the LLM. At no point did the people who created the LLM actually think about your use-case, nor did the LLM, and there is no promise of anything you ask getting a correct, or even consistent answer. The creators don't know how the answers got there, and can't easily fix them if they're wrong. You'd be a fool to trust it for anything other than dog and pony shows.
    - tucosan 2y ago
      > This is the crux of our disagreement. No it's not. There is an observable and testable probability that an LLMs output is correct or false. There is an observable and testable probability that code created by humans is erroneous. There is a third category where human code is malicious. You will need to guard against all three cases. Guarding against a possibly faulty LLM output that is passed to ffmpeg is significantly easier to realise through defensive prompting and simple sanitization techniques, than to protect against a malicious state actor that is capable of crafting sophisticated supply chain attacks that took years to develop and roll out (again see the xz backdoor). The idea that you can blindly trust an open source project just because "their development happens collaboratively and in the open" is naive. Some open source projects people are building their whole infrastructure on are maintained by a single developer in their spare time. The attack surface is huge and has been exploited time and time again. Just because a project like Debian has signed packages and a security team doesn't guarantee that the underlying code doesn't have some malicious backdoor or some grave bug that creates a big attack surface.

asddubs 2y ago

got it, never do apt-get upgrade

madeofpalk 2y ago

You never search for documentation? From either a first or third party site?