Too bad the phrase fork bomb is already taken
this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
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This is why we can’t have nice things
Sorta kinda wondering (conspiracy thought, totally no evidence, just a random thing that came to my mind) if this is either an attack on AI or attempt to compromise those who use AI to write their code. Or both.
I'm thinking that ssh agents aren't safe at all today if I decrypt the secret key upon login. It was always a security issue, but now we probably should assume we have one or two malware installed. No way antivirus can counter these AIs.
The risk here is slightly overblown or misrepresented. Just because a fork exists doesn't mean that anyone has even read it, let alone run it on their system. For this to be a real threat they would have to publish packages with identical or similar names (ie typo-squatting) to public package repositories which this article didn't have any information on but which is a known problem long before AI. The level of obfuscation and number of repos affected is impressive but ultimately unlikely to have widespread impact to anyone besides GitHub.
The thing is, how do I know whether the Debian repo is free of them? Arch user repos? The node.js packages? My pip? The package managers I don't really understand but had to use anyway? Code from my colleagues? My students? Vim plugins?
Every program can do ssh to my critical remote computer if they want to.
And now someone in the chain can land on the wrong github page suggested by Google, which itself is bent to its knees by ChatGPT.
Again, this existed before AI. Typo squatting, supply chain attacks, automated package uploads, CI pipeline infection, they're all known attack vectors. That's not to say this isn't a concern, just that it's a known risk and the addition of "AI" doesn't, to my eyes, increase that risk. If your SSH keys don't require a password, you have taken the decision to make those keys less secure but more convenient to use. That's pretty much always the tradeoff in security.
I'm talking about the magnitude