Something about the writing style here makes it hard for me to follow what actually happened. The section about JSONP for example seems to be explaining how JSONP works and how it's designed as an attempt to work around these attacks, but that explanation is then passed off as an explanation of how they bypassed the protection. And the whole premise seems to be about how manipulating the Preview content let them work through multiple defensive layers, but I don't see an explanation of how they directly controlled that content in the first place. I would have thought that the only control you have over the content of "an ordinary public ChatGPT share" is the prompt text, and that any migration of that text into "a small working webpage using its Preview feature" is up to the model deciding to generate that "HTML block" in response.
They're writing for bots, not humans. This is a marketing piece. They're trying to get themselves to come up as the answer when people ask chatbots questions.<p>You're not the target audience of writing on the Internet anymore.
It's AI written so of course it's hard to follow.
> OpenAI confirmed both frontends rejected the reported messages, resolved the issue, and awarded a total bounty of $5,000.<p>It requires the user to click a link. But I still find this bounty very low. Others may not report them if such a small bounty is given.
I took over user accounts in Microsoft Copilot (there are caveats but still), and they asked me to provide additional information of the exploit (they wanted a video) and before I sent it they fixed the vulnerability, didn't pay me a cent. Fair? Idk.
A bounty like this is a polite "thanks asshole, fuck off, don't do it again" rate.<p>Paying effectively nothing for vulnerabilities just means they don't want to deal with the program.<p>Wild to think a company supposedly worth a $trillion+ is doing shit like this.
Because they shouldn’t be worth that tbh. They are a cash burning operation hoping to get what they can before the music stops.
A company worth trillions does not have trillions, that is the expectation for <i>what it will be worth in the future based on money it has already spent and will need to keep spending.</i><p>Moreover, that translates to "it's actually carrying a huge nut* that puts extremely intense pressure on the company to figure out how to make as much money as possible as soon as possible."<p>(*nut is a slang word from loan sharking that has been adopted by (personal et al) finance people. It means "how much do you owe each month?" in the sense of, if you want to do a startup, advisors could ask, "what's your nut, and how much do you have left to self-invest?" Because monthly expense can be combined to a lump sum, it can also mean the size of the overall loan where the monthly interest is called the vig, "as long youze got da nut, you owe me da vig;" from vigorish, which would also require an etymology, but I'm assuming it's the word vigor combined with licorice meaning bitter tasting medicine, and nut because squirrels busy themselves carrying nuts.)<p>----<p>and if we can... and remember flame-prone people, if you reject the "can" premise, then the rest of the argument goes away, and you don't need to dispute it, you just say "you can't nuff said"; people here frequently seem challenged by propositions.<p>so, if we can...loosely describe the attitude you show here toward high market cap companies to be compatible with "left" or "socialist" or "populist" views shared by many others here, then I'll point out that at the same time wanting higher market prices paid for bounties because 'sploits are so expensive, is actually advocating for the same dread capitalist market based solution that leads to trillion dollar companies that never even had a trillion to begin with.
That’s so low. That’s the level of bounty I awarded researchers when I was managing the bug bounty program at a small startup, it’s just ridiculous coming from a large company like OpenAI
They have just announced free API credits for Pro plan users up to $500 per month. Irony.
I find Sam Altman recent comments very "low" as well, neither matters. So in that case I think bounty hunters should just cold shoulder idiocracy and sell these to the underground. Let their customers be abused and complain about how OAI isn't protecting them. Each one of these types of events could cost them thousands of dollars in lost revenue and/or internal support.
2 trillion $ companies should have the money to pay for these exploits. If they don’t, go tucking exploit them. If they don’t give a fuck about stealing knowledge from copyrighted material and private git repos, light em up.
some people don’t want to be criminals as a matter of ethics<p>but hey you do you
True, however:<p>Ethics and legal requirements shouldn’t be conflated.<p>There are times when ethics are a higher standard than what the law requires, and in that case the ethics are no less important.
Yes, you have a moral obligation to Sam Altman’s trillion dollar business.
On the contrary, many (including myself) would argue that "the victim's amount of money/power" has absolutely no ethical relevance: "You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great, but you are to judge your neighbor fairly" (Leviticus 19:15).
But some would argue that reducing the amount of resources and power available to someone who has immense amounts of both and is causing great harm to society as a whole - is ethical.
Citing a fantasy novel to prove your point doesn't add anything to the discussion.
This isn’t one of those times.
Is it criminal to sell an exploit?
Facilitation of a crime is a crime too. So I think in the US and most western countries, yes. At least if it gets used illegally later.
I don't think so, businesses like Zerodium bought zero days in plain sight and I don't think they faced legal consequences. They don't operate anymore though. So basically I'd say it depends who you sell it to and how.
Treating people and businesses ethically that don't reciprocate doesn't work, clearly. Those people and businesses cry in their milk while they do exactly the same thing. There are no ethics in play here.<p>But, hey if you want to defend billionaire narcissists that are destroying our planet and trying to take computing freedoms then I guess: you do you.
Yeah, and some people just want the multi-billion dollar company that is currently destroying the planet while also permanently crippling social connections to just stop.
Ah yes, OpenAI, the poster child for ethics
If only poverty were so simple
This isn't like stealing from a business. These are individuals most private conversations, potentially including their bank accounts etc. Poverty is no defence - and yes, I've spent a great deal of my life barely scraping by. You'll find poor people are significantly less tolerant of theft, especially from individuals, than rich. Whether that evidences the theft inherent in most forms of wealth generation I'll leave up to the reader.
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Not worth the effort for a company supposedly worth a trillion dollars. The problem is oai can't afford all of its mistakes at the usual rate and they make bad press. A 100k bug could make a headline, but 5k for the same bug requires the average person to be educated enough to understand how bad these issues are.
OpenAI acknowledging and fixing the bug is worth millions
This is a pet peeve of tptacek:<p>> server-side vulnerabilities are worth very little, because they quickly get patched.
The "take over any instagram/meta account through their AI password reset chatbot" was going around and sold on shady forums for ~1 month before being patched.
then server side vulnerabilities should not be reported, instead sell the data, more profitable
Very few people would even have the knowledge of who, how, or where to "sell" such vulnerabilities. Going through a public bounty program is pretty much always preferable.<p>Most people don't want to be felons.
Don't worry, as more and more people get put of of work by AI the number of people willing to be felons will increase. Hell, they might even become president.
I am sure this is a crime, but what crime?
I think people who can hack, also know where they can sell it
Indeed, it's like "here peasant, have this fortune of $5,000, may it change your life". Pathetic.
Oof. Together with the fact that it's possible to remotely access the file system (!) of computers ever having started a "Work" chat in the ChatGPT desktop app [1], this seems pretty bad.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078284">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078284</a>
Does no one write their own blogs anymore?
For my personal blog [0], I am still writing without LLM assistance. The goal is to test how well I understand the topic I am writing about, as well as to improve my own writing.<p>[0] <a href="https://trung.to" rel="nofollow">https://trung.to</a>
I actually still write my own blog [1] :sweat_smile:<p>Pure html by hand, using vim. No frameworks, no nothing, single stylesheet. I think there are a few others around here that still do this.<p>[1] <a href="https://armincat.com/" rel="nofollow">https://armincat.com/</a>
This one is particularly bad, like they probably made $7500 (not much tbh) for p1, atleast spend a few hours to write the blog post.
For who?
unrelated to this, but this company randomly reached out disclosing a vulnerability to us (test environment, synthetic tenant). on the one hand, thank you, it’s patched. on the other - we do not have a bug bounty program and this is not welcome. having agent swarms randomly breaking in to environments and then marketing their services in the disclosure is not an ideal sales tactic, in addition to being illegal.
I don't want to defend them, but the alternative is that they do nothing and you don't know about the vulnerability until a bad actor exploits it (something easy and cheap nowadays).<p>I'm confused, would you welcome that more?
$5000 is a joke. They pay millions to their top devs and still have more holes than a colander so a nice guy shows you a huge opening in your platform and all you can give him is a pat on the shoulder? Did you fire your top devs and hire that guy for a million bucks plus options? Did you sue the security firm you paid millions to audit the issues?<p>I really hope they get hacked and crash down burning in flames like the Hindenburg
I wonder if the new economics of finding bugs means that they pay the amount they think the tokens cost to find it.
Makes negative sense. If it were that easy, OpenAI wouldn't have any bugs bc they could just run agents to exploit their own stuff and then fix all their bugs.<p>This bug could not be found by just asking an AI "find bugs in ChatGPT", that's why it was reported through a bug bounty programs and that's why it should be worth more than $5k
Over the probability that you'll find something.
I think you know that the mentality of a company like this is “security is a risk but not a reward and whoever captures the reward kills everyone else”
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actually, your comment is naive. clearly you don't understand game theory and economic incentives. if a company doesn't reward good behavior, you'll see bad behavior.<p>but then again since you're not naive, you already know these AI companies like openai already act evil and like bad entities.<p>I conclude therefore, per your words "you are the last one anyone should consult with, basically about anything"
$5000 is a joke for a "P1" vuln
Now what about those millions of lines of code? Wasn’t the agent swarm supposed to take care of it?
All jokes aside this is exactly what happens as you build larger monoliths, system complexity and bug surface increases logarithmically… so in all seriousness you want to reduce LOC as much as possible. Maybe this can teach OpenAI a lesson to produce software that’s correct and adhere to established engineering standards over sensationalised “we built so much code” promotional material.
Did you mean exponentially? Logarithmic increase doesn't sound too bad.
I’m sure exponential is what parent meant, but geometric (edit: polynomial) is what actually happens, not exponential. Code complexity increases linearly when it doesn’t interact with other features, and geometrically when it does. In the worst case, complexity increases as the square of lines of code. That is still very, very bad, but it’s not exponential.
it's not like microservices fare better, when you introduce them, you've traded a hard problem for a hard problem and distributed computing...
I like LOEC: <i>Lines of Effective Code</i>.<p>Much easier to reason and make decisions if the bar is "yeah it exists, but is it effective relative to its intended purpose?" This weeds out buggy code as well as under performant code. If it's not effective (broken, too slow, etc), it either needs a refactor or thrown on the scrap pile.
Reducing attack surface is a lesson for everyone. Newcomers are impressed by massive piles of code.<p>Seasoned developers are unimpressed, or even disgusted, by the same massive piles of code.
i don't think LoC is <i>the</i> metric. sometimes fewer lines of code results in a larger attack surface through type coercion / widening, poor abstractions, hiding or stuffing behavior (modules that do everything), etc. to me, making code easy to understand, test, fuzz, and verify is more important. sometimes that requires more lines of code.
More abstract code probably results in more high-abstraction-level bugs per LoC, but also less low-abstraction-level bugs so I'd guess it about cancels out to an even rate per LoC.<p>A single line in C++, Rust or Haskell can have a really subtle logic error. A single line in assembly can't, but it has that same likelihood of having a register allocation error instead, and when you add up all the many lines of assembly you probably still wrote the same number of logic errors as the C++ version.
LoC *IS* the metric. It is obviously not perfect tho but still the best one to compare software surface. Including to compare the same solution in different languages and platforms. The less code you need to manage, the less code you need to change and the less code you need to hold in your head to understand it (or in the LLM context nowadays).
<a href="https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html</a>
> Now what about those millions of lines of code? Wasn’t the agent swarm supposed to take care of it?<p>What's the joke? They're literally saying, every day, that this is true to a <i>civilization endangering</i> extent. They're making demands based on this, and politicians are taking up those demands.<p>And now they're paying bullshit $5K bug bounties for account-stealing exploits on their own platform. They should have paid more just the make the bug seem more grandiose; I don't know who let them get away with this - this is what happens when CEOs run their own PR I guess. It's basically an public announcement that they're total fakes.
Appreciate the incremental write up building up the scope of the poc.<p>I like the chain of regular old school things used to achieve it like post message, JSONP, iframe, Img tags.
I think there was another HN discussion about it re bounty value and as far as I remember the issue is not that big companies are greedy in that case, but rather that over time it’s strategically better to have lower bounties so less people are interested in it.<p>5 or 50k doesnt matter to them. And this bug in terms of severity is very high imho.
It's exhilarating (for the lack of the knowledge of a better word) to see OpenAI and Anthropic starting getting hacked and getting a taste of their own medicine. Brings back hope that actual software engineering is not dead yet.
Hex aka Parameter is an irresponsible company, on my blacklist. after they did an unsolicited pentest on us, we scheduled a call. joke of a team.<p>hilarious that their headline message, on every web page, is `Backed by YC`.<p>also, the product is way behind their competitors anyway.<p>really cool exploit they found here, but that doesn't make them a company worth doing business with.
5k makes me think the next guy is gonna sell his exploit in the black market instead.
if only they had some sort of cybersecurity state of the art thing...
we are getting to the point of “why have passwords?” Right? At some point soon we have to move to the honor system of just please don’t login as me?
My latest project emails a magic link.<p>I'm trying not to have any important data to even lose, when I eventually get hacked.<p>We can all turn up our noses, like the other commenters in this thread, but every one of them is exposed. Negligence is a matter of degrees.
> I'm trying not to have any important data to even lose<p>This is the way. Respect user privacy and keep as little data as possible, and not only do you become a less attractive target, if you <i>are</i> targeted the outcome won’t be so bad.
> please don’t login as me<p>Please don't drain my $6.5 billion in Dogecoin.
Been sayin this for years. Everybody in the world world: just BE COOL. Solves like every internet problem at once.
only $5000 for this, lmao. It should be $50k out of pure shame. If they don't make these things hurt just a little they're never going to take following best practices seriously enough. There will be 9 more anyways.<p>Meanwhile the actual user of the account probably has to sign in using a yubikey because they get "CyBeRsEcRuItY aLeRtS" when they try to update node in their project to fix a crash and have to switch to daybreak blue to continue (or attempt to trick the normal models into doing it and risk getting autobanned)
> able to take over anyone's account simply by sending them a link<p>dont click links people<p>that'll be $500k for the security training pls
If they or their company use email "security" software that "scans" all links it's not necessarily the users fault / they don't in fact click. The mail is auto-confirmed the second it hits the inbox.<p>We've had to change our registration confirmation mails too recently to not confirm on GET only, but with another form - in hindsight it was stupid before but many services do that.
> We've had to change our registration confirmation mails too recently to not confirm on GET only, but with another form - in hindsight it was stupid before but many services do that.<p>This has been a thing since forever lol
Security software fetching links will not trigger this behavior. It needs to be done in the context of the actual ChatGPT user so that a JavaScript payload can run.<p>If merely GET on the link was sufficient to trigger the behaviors, the adversary generating the link would just GET it themselves.
Yes, if it requires the user session (xss related), like the article, there is no problem.<p>I was replying more generally about the "don't click links" advice and cases of server generated confirmation-token links (not saying this was the case at OpenAI)
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... says IT and then it sets Outlook to mangle link to abominations like [0]. "Check if the preview shows something different or suspicious."<p>[0]: <a href="https://che01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbacdejch.r.bh.d.sendibn3.com%2Ftr%2Fcl%2FVz2dpK7aTRDmFguneCeJFOsH-jnP3381Da-oD8NRpnX06Wikci0XIbFxr1Awults48nHvxK53tVwMTxHYTmVvRd_8skWX9p4vCeuTokQphe3sLzaOYjnGNGB82Tc5nd6LyL6JUKzXH-GFdNHh4WTW21tijbgXWHdf4uGFaTtDtrIpDyj2BBXb3t500K0twB7DjityDevYEmNzqDXCyXxN4O2QSMlkzdoMCmQC39LapqesRtxF11X8Fhed7nqg6PsAMq5VGksIpelAAJSR-rS3W0Bm1AuPa0TQ_EMww&data=05d7C02%7Ctobias.menzi%40schuleschlieren.ch%7C22b863a49b1c4efd220708df2eab2ffb%7Cf533134e5efd439790b1d7d13fe7cb33%7C0%7C0%7C639280986892426791%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1GkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C80000%7C%7C%7C&sdat=mOCeMF9cngDSTnQNiTQj7O2fM4cqO%2BquGQD%2BxubJbMI%3D&reserved=0" rel="nofollow">https://che01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A...</a>
I wanted to check your website from your profile, but then I remembered your advice. Thanks!, dodged a potential bullet
Also many emails from tech companies today:<p>- "sign in via one-time code."<p>- "Click here to see our latest update".
Thanks! Here, click on this link to get paid
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5k is nothing for the amount of headache you just saved them..
Claude or Gemini didn’t find the vulnerability on ChatGPT?
Sigh.
With how good Openai are good in programming frontier agents, they still have weak security. Hmmn, i'm short of words.
why didnt the black box of bullshit company detect this? for a group that touts every inane 'discovery' with hyperbolic bullshit, they really fall short on delivering anything of actual value, just rehashed bullshit.
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Another classic OAuth implementation failure. Mismanaging the state parameter or leaking tokens via referer headers in redirects is Security 101. Wild to see this in a production environment of this scale.
The post seems to be talking about a html injection via a postMessage call where the receiver didn’t check who sent the message, which is a well known vulnerability entry point. Did I miss where OAuth had anything to do with this??
Production scale is not production grade I guess...