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Posted by Handy-Man 8 hours ago

A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos(www.hacktron.ai)
360 points | 155 commentspage 4
4ndrewl 1 hour ago|
Why wouldn't it occur to OpenAI to run their models to secure their own systems? Seems like a clown show.
kerenskiy 7 hours ago||
$6 500 bounty for this is a joke. The black market price would be smth like $6 500 000 or more
tptacek 7 hours ago||
There is probably no black market for this at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43025038

lbrandy 5 hours ago|||
You and I have both been here on HN nearing 20 years and you’ve been making this comment to that comment about bug bounties and the supposed black market value of exploits for the whole time. I suspect you’ll never run out of threads to correct. Thank you for your service.
kerenskiy 6 hours ago||||
Okay, then first download all their sources (perhaps with model weights?) and sell that. Not the bug itself
tptacek 6 hours ago||
Now you're not selling a vulnerability, you're planning a heist. That is a thing you can do!
Mohansrk 4 hours ago||||
curious, the bug allows dumping private repositories of openai, that sure has black market right?
parhamn 6 hours ago|||
> Valuations for server-side vulnerabilities are low, because vendors don't compete for them.

Why don't they?

devmor 6 hours ago||
Because as soon as they are patched, they are worthless.

People pay for vulnerabilities because they want to exploit them - if there’s a limited window, there’s limited demand.

Even if there’s something worth a lot behind the exploit, a potential criminal would be better off obtaining whatever that is and selling it instead.

fancythat 6 hours ago|||
Yes. And that's why, if you are in the bug bounty business it is important to focus on companies that understand security and pay well and not on wannabe slave owners like this one. No pay - no audit.
samtheprogram 6 hours ago|||
Per the article, that's the price OpenAI is willing to pay for an exploit that covers any account or integration one connects to their OpenAI account. Let that sink in.

I don't think the other commenters mentioning how server-side vulnerabilities aren't as lucrative in the black market are making that connection.

sudo_cowsay 7 hours ago|||
That's why people like doing bad things. It pays. Why do you think movies like using this single theme over and over again? It's always happening
kdkdkwkdjej 7 hours ago||
I suspect you don’t really know what you are talking about. “It pays.” is not the only reason people like doing bad things. You’re right about the movies bit though, people tend to like black and white narratives as your naive “That’s why people like doing bad things. It pays.” comment perfectly demonstrates.
loveparade 7 hours ago||
I also thought that's crazy. Why even bother for these kind of bounties.
msephton 5 hours ago||
Discourse didn't pay bug bounty?
alpineman 3 hours ago||
$6.5K bounty when OpenAI raised $122 billion yesterday...if anyone at OpenAI is reading this, come on...do the right thing here
rvz 7 hours ago||
This whole blog-post is impressive with the chain of vulnerabilities involved. However...

> OpenAI also paid us a $6,500 bounty.

?

That amount for this payout is beyond pathetic for a near $1.2T company, who just got themselves breached with a complete potential source code leak.

This is like getting close to breaching the main monorepo at Google: google3.

If this was on the black market and the leak included unreleased models and training material, it would easily be worth tens of millions. Even reporting crypto smart contract flaw pay way more than that on average of $100k - $10M.

Come on.

muglug 7 hours ago||
My guess is that OpenAI has done a lot more to prevent exfil of their model weights than the codebase of their main web app and client.
fwlr 5 hours ago|||
Perhaps the exploit was not as large or dangerous as the team says it is.
redox99 3 hours ago||
It's a monorepo and they're at over 1 million PRs. There's surely some juicy stuff there.
agentwang 2 hours ago|||
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sudo_cowsay 7 hours ago||
The unfortunate truth of doing the right thing. Also, correct me if I'm wrong but there are too many bad things out there and companies can't give 1 million bounty for stuff like that. I'm sure they could but in the long run, wouldn't it be unsustainable?
Barbing 7 hours ago|||
It’s an interesting bet then.

Pay next to nothing every time, accept one financially-depressed researcher sale to blackhats causing tremendous business disruption every n years. Cheaper than honest payouts to [keep] researchers [honest]? Keep paying chump change. (Booo)

Shank 7 hours ago||||
How much would a nation state pay for a complete copy of OpenAI’s github repositories? I doubt there are many full chains laying around like this.
kdkdkwkdjej 7 hours ago|||
No more unsustainable than these companies already are by default. The bounty should have been proportionate to how important and pressing the findings were.
alwaysreading 6 hours ago||
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dgf18 3 hours ago|
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