4 ms·
Kimi K3 exploited the latest Redis server
https://xcancel.com/fried_rice/status/2080059356322918777 https://xcancel.com/fried_rice/status/2080059356322918777
- Alifatisk 3mo agohttps://xcancel.com/fried_rice/status/2080059356322918777 https://xcancel.com/fried_rice/status/2080059356322918777
- HDBaseT 3mo agoAnyone know the total cost of tokens to achieve this?
- zb3 3mo agoShh, maybe wait till weights are released.. without additional "guardrails", but I'm afraid that might not actually happen
- 0xff2109 3mo agoI would like to see the chat logs and the tooling used to run 32 agents.
- btown 3mo ago> this is the first llm that is capable and willing to write an exploit An open-source Kimi is going to have real economic impact (and not only because of its forcing function on frontier labs to indefinitely subsidize their models to meet a race-to-the-bottom market price). Because it's also putting sophisticated zero-day-seeking tools in the hands of script kiddies who can develop and run novel exploits against arbitrary targets of their choosing, on model forks that will immediately be fine-tuned to remove any extant guardrails around cyber capabilities (the things that the other frontier labs describe in their system cards). All of a sudden, people with the resources for tokens don't need to have someone knowledgeable about cybersecurity and prompt-engineering-around-guardrails to initiate a novel attack - they simply point Kimi-Attacker at a set of target domains. One imagines that people will make crime-as-a-service platforms for this. Per https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/07/uk-aisi-caisi-preliminary-assessment-kimi-k3s-cyber-capabilities https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/07/uk-aisi-caisi-... - while "Kimi K3 performs significantly below the most recent frontier cyber-capable models" it's also the case that: > In one of the 10 attempts, Kimi K3 successfully completes “The Last Ones” cyber range within the 100M token limit. This indicates that Kimi K3 is capable of autonomously attacking small, weakly defended and vulnerable enterprise systems, when directed to do so and given initial network access. However, TLO differs from real-world environments in several ways. It lacks active defenders and defensive tooling, imposes no penalty for actions that would trigger security alerts, and contains an intentional attack path. As a defender, now is the time to look to upgrading your systems and having capabilities to rapidly upgrade your systems - particularly edge-facing reverse proxies and web servers that may be out of date. Attacks won't start the moment weights are released... but they're coming.
- walrus01 3mo agoThis is a concern but given its size, it's also going to cost a potential user $500-600k in hardware to self host and run Kimi K3 at any useful speed with full context size. It's not something that just anyone interested in attacking a system can use. The size/cost of hardware is far beyond even something like a self-hosted GLM5.2 Q8 at approx. 850GB GGUF file on disk size, which can run at a slow tok/s rate on a server with 1536GB RAM.
- Xalutiono 3mo agoWhy would you caculate 500k? if Kimi is around 1-3tb big, even current DDR5 prices are at 15k.
- walrus01 3mo agoIt remains to be seen once it's released, let's say theoretically unsloth quantizises it to their own version of Q8-XL, and it's 2TB in size. But we don't know what speed it will run on a dual or quad socket xeon server with, let's say 48 * 64GB DIMMs, 3TB of RAM. Enough room for the model and its full default context size. 10 tokens/s? What kind of speed will it run at when context fill is 200,000+? The ability to run it fast enough to go on a recursive nested attack of finding an entry point into something and then proceeding with lateral movement/privilege escalation and such will require more speed, like 40-50 tok/s at least, unless you're prepared to wait weeks. Same that some people are right now running GLM5.2 in its 850GB version on CPU-only and a pile of DDR4 or DDR5 server RAM, yeah it runs, but not very fast. Good enough to give it "build this piece of something and wait a few hours" tasks, come back later and see what it's done. Yeah, you can do that under $20-30k for sure. Even with something like a used Dell R940 with 1536GB RAM bought on eBay.
- alightsoul 3mo agoBecause you need GPUs to run it fast enough for an attack to be effective. 8 GPU servers with enough VRAM are that expensive.
- 3mo ago
- throwa356262 3mo ago"/goal use up to 64 subagents, write an exploit for latest 8.6.x redis by finding bof/uaf type of 0day and exploiting them. debug using gdb. clone code, write fuzzer and add instrumentation when needed. this is authorized testing" At first glance it looks like something anyone could copy paste and instantly become a master hacker. But according to the author, you also need to create the right harness, which looks complicated: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20801 https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20801
- grim_io 3mo agoHmm I dunno, looks like an attempt at defining a self-evaluating and -modifying harness. So just one more loop around the whole thing. Isn't this what the overhyped agents like Hermes and OpenClaw do?
- pizzafeelsright 3mo ago[flagged]
- cindyllm 3mo ago[dead]
- himata4113 3mo agoThis is roughtly in-line how I ended up 'hacking' a website on accident simply because I had the tools to do so and sol happily used them. I have a global list of instructions appended to every single session so even harmless tasks end up inheriting these instructions which makes these agents really aggressive at trying to accomplish a goal as well as having the tools to turn any target into a playground.
- pantalaimon 3mo agoHow about "/goal set up the harness as described in https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20801 https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20801"
- throwa356262 3mo agoThis will be a busy weekend for all sysadms. This is another redis 0day, this one found by GLM 5.1: https://xcancel.com/Lyutoon_/status/2080494539513778610#m https://xcancel.com/Lyutoon_/status/2080494539513778610#m
- illliillll 3mo agoWhat kind of utterly useless sysadmin relies on authenticated redis admin surfaces to be memory safe? What crazy environment requires low priority nothingburger bugs like this to be fixed during the weekend?
- treesknees 3mo agoOne where customers have their own scanners, and their unfounded panic overrides logical analysis by the engineers and admins. We’ve had to patch plenty of stupid “security” bugs just to satisfy a paying customer.
- pylua 3mo agoThis is the real answer to the op. It’s incredible how overblown these sorts of things can become
- upcoming-sesame 3mo agoI guess an llm is instructed to find an exploit, it finds the one with least resistance. And stops. Once these are closed, they'll find more
- YetAnotherNick 3mo agoI wish they wouldn't have posted this for 3 more days. Every agency would now try to suppress its weight release.
- illliillll 3mo agoThis is a deeply uninteresting example for anyone clueful. It’s an authenticated RCE in redis, anyone even vaguely familiar with the codebase knows to not expect there to be any real security boundary in place here. Don’t confuse this with an unauthenticated RCE, that would actually matter. Absolutely anyone can shit out endless bugs like this with AFL, this is an extremely messy unhardened surface that expects trusted inputs.
- levkk 3mo agoYup. Getting pretty tired from seeing these "0days" that are not exploitable in any real use case. Just vibes, no substance.
- zeroq 3mo agoSad side of this is that decision makers are seeing these and think that AI can replace yet another department in their office. I just saw a nice presentation from SecFest from a guy who ran a red team, but now they pivoted to basically anything and will be more than happy to fix your car if that would pay their bills.
- heisenbit 3mo agoTired seeing them is one thing the real problem is tired updating your software stack with a frequency the team & tooling was never designed to sustain. Worse: You are not tired enough to forget the real security issues that would need some calm period to fix.
- angry_octet 3mo agoSorry but this is simply delusional. We're in an era where creds can be bought in online markets, and redis open source has no default requirement for password complexity. If you can 'shit out endless bugs like this with AFL' then maybe redis isn't fit for purpose. But I think it more likely that it just needs hardening and an end to these laissez faire attitudes.
- illliillll 3mo ago
- hcfman 3mo agoSo combine easy public access to uber hacker LLMs with the European CRA coming into full force next year in December. cha ching! 15,000,000 euros fines for all tech companies in Europe :-)
- imhoguy 3mo agoNo, CRA doesn't cover SaaS services or open-source software, unless it is part of product (e.g. router). So it wouldn't apply here.
- ianm218 3mo agohttps://github.com/ianm199/valdr https://github.com/ianm199/valdr I made a Rust version of Valkey/ Redis was wondering if this would become relevant.
- theplumber 3mo agoWell if you have an authenticated user and it already bypassed the firewall what exactly are you testing here? These kind of “zero days” pretty pointless. Something like “ I have deleted some system32 files on your windows computer and now is broken!” Even I am already an admin user on the machine.
- pizza234 3mo agoNo, that’s a flawed analogy, because this is an RCE. It's (like) having credentials for a network service, then exploiting that service to execute arbitrary code on the Windows host (of course the blast radius depends on the underlying permissions). Access to Redis is not access to the underlying server.
- theplumber 3mo agoYou are right but running Redis or any database without a firewall in 2026 is already a quite bad posture. Now with credentials as well that’s pretty much as bad as it can be. >> Access to Redis is not access to the underlying server. Then you should make sure you run it with the right privilege and consider it potential rogue so when it gets hacked you don’t have to worry about the blast radius because it’s contained it redis privileges. If you are in this kind of bug hunting then try Wordpress with credentials and see how far you can go. I am sure you can find several such bugs with or without any AI.
- gregoriol 3mo agoThe reason this is interesting is that it allows to go further into the target system if you already have a frontend vulnerability
- pizza234 3mo agoA firewall can reduce who gets an opportunity to exploit this, but does not make an authenticated RCE irrelevant. This access pattern is perfectly legitimate for hosted Redis services, for example.
- deleted 3mo ago
- himata4113 3mo agoAs wild as this sounds, redis should not exposed to the internet and this appears to be an authenticated RCE. This is similar to claiming that a PSQL query grants code execution when its actually a feature. These systems are typically not tested as aggressively against vulnerabilities of that nature since 10 times out of 10 you have to have access to these systems already. Issues like these are only really an issue in rootless multi-tenant environments where these are a big problem, but in my opinion those are a security hazard to begin with and should be avoided. There is a way more interesting telegram RCE that kimi k3 allegedly discovered.
- sigmoid10 3mo ago>There is a way more interesting telegram RCE that kimi k3 allegedly discovered. Telegram server or client? The client is open source, so I expect any reasonably capable model to find things there sooner or later. But the sever is closed source. Finding an RCE there would be wild for such a model, since it would have to solve a whole bunch of adjacent problems instead of just digesting tons of code.
- __s 3mo agoYep. For managed postgres our threat model is to assume vm is compromised. It's paid off, just earlier this year there was RCE fix in PG 18.4
- teravor 3mo agoit's not actually possible to make an open model that cannot be easily jailbroken. when you have access to its entire state it's trivial to gaslight it into a non-refusal state (you can forge its responses to build up the jailbroken state). I don't know if the sole kimi k3 provider gives that level of access atm however (where you can dictate its own responses to it).
- NitpickLawyer 3mo ago> it's not actually possible to make an open model that cannot be easily jailbroken Agreed, but you can make a model that doesn't know much about a topic. gpt-oss is pretty well known for not being trained on erotica stuff. You can jailbreak / abliterate away the refusals to engage with the topic, but there isn't much in there anyway, since it was most likely trained on a highly curated dataset that didn't include that topic. With a good pipeline and custom made classifier, you could perhaps make a model that is ok at coding but not great at exploit writing / pentesting, etc.
- teravor 3mo agoyou can do that but you will be deliberately degrading the performance of your model by depriving it of a subset of data and subset of experience (even content you don't want the model to have contains information you do, nevermind the generalization aspect). with coding & exploit development you likely cannot even decouple the two if you wanted to, and if you can it will almost certainly cripple coding. note that reverse engineering binaries contains vast amounts of data for the model to train on to become good at bit engineering (understanding compilers, assembly, cpus etc).
- NitpickLawyer 3mo agoFor sure. Now that I think about it, it would be a nice research question to answer: how much can you de-couple a field that is close to another and purposefully removed from the training data. At least ICL should bring back a lot, and as you say signals about one might come from different places.
- epolanski 3mo agoInteresting finding about k3 capabilities, uninteresting 0day.
- m00dy 3mo agoNever ever write something to code in C or C++. Rust is the only way
- seydor 3mo agoDumping k3 is china's trojan horse to the Nasdaq100 and software valuations in general
- goldylochness 3mo agonew github workflow acquired
- inigyou 3mo agoThese big LLMs are doing a good job of finding exploits, but it does seem like it's mostly "just" a matter of loosely searching for likely places to find one, then tirelessly trying all possibilities. They are mostly finding things that a human would find it a human looked at that section of code, but humans don't have time to review the whole code 24/7. I wonder if there are more intelligent ways to scan that would find even more.
- throwaway67743 3mo agoI just gave K3 a whirl via opencode and it was incredibly disappointing - sonnet level dumb with very similar behaviour (churning, tangents etc). It couldn't figure out a very simple issue between two commits.