im a happy customer of tailscale, so i am obviously biased, but i have a lot of respect for this. they could have just stayed quiet and i dont think anyone would have bat an eye.
they are a company, therefor anything they write is an advertisement of sorts, but that doesn't make it bad by default. cloudflare and netflix (among others) also write blog posts that i find interesting and enjoy reading, despite being ads at their core.
We also saw Anthropic post about “our agent escaped too” and while I understand the incident caused them to review, they found something and needed to disclose, the whole thing came across much worse and largely they got mocked or accused of trying to piggyback, so obviously there are good and bad ways.
If there are other providers with interesting takes, I think they would be worth hearing.
I wish I could say the same.
At $work we use Tailscale but only bare minimum and at arms length and only because we have to (people were having NAT issues with standard Wireguard).
None of their code has had a security audit, let alone regular ones. Yes they make a big song and dance about SOC2/ISO27001 but that is NOT the same thing, that's just shiny tick-boxes for compliance departments.
They seem to rely entirely on the random goodwill of others to do random audits of unknown coverage at random intervals, not exactly reassuring.
"Tailsale Lock" is, being polite, a hot mess. So many sharp edges and footguns.
Their introduction of TPM-by-default and then removing it a few weeks later because of a seemingly small number of edge-cases and very odd reasoning was just weird.
Yes they are nice guys to chat to and all that. But for a security tool they need to up their game seriously.
It's true that those two audits aren't the same thing. However, the SOC2 auditor confirms, in the published report, that Tailscale has regular and ongoing security audits including penetration tests and many kinds of code reviews.
The security audit report, which you perhaps imagine to be a long list of vulnerabilities... doesn't look like that. It says we don't have a long list of vulnerabilities. The security bulletins are all here: https://tailscale.com/security-bulletins
Which, by definition, means they are not done by you, which means you don't know when they will be done or how much of your code base they are looking at.
I think you know full well what I mean by a security audit. If you don't, go look at, for example, the ones that Mullvad publish for their software https://mullvad.net/en/blog/tag/audits.
Please do not try to portray SOC2 as being the same thing as a code audit.
And IF you have regular code audits, then please publish suitably redacted reports in public on your website. Just like everyone else does !
Bugs that are found by other people are found, by definition, after release. They are therefore more likely to need a bulletin.
Those are an ancient class of bugs that should be picked up by any competent security review.
But things like insecure argument handling are low-hanging fruit for security auditors.
Insecure argument handling is not like the more advanced subtle vulnerabilities that we are seeing in some LLM-assisted reports these days. Insecure argument handling is 1990's security.
The fundamental problem remains that Tailscale has too many new "features" being added to it the whole time. New features means a whole bunch new code. Which increases bloat and exponentially increases the attack surface.
It would be really nice if you could stop shoehorning in every new feature you can think of. Remove some of the existing ones that don't really need to be there. And get your codebase back to a more focused state, get back to your roots as a VPN product.
Stop trying to be all things to all men, as the old saying goes.
I use it but feel uncomfortable, that it has large attack surface and LLMs will find exploits in it.
Without taillock it makes no sense. Anyone on their coordination servers will be able to connect to your network.
Doesn't this apply to any application you use? How would it be different with plain wireguard?
Seriously ?
You do realise that of all the security tools on the planet, plain wireguard most likely has the smallest attack surface of them all, right ?
The problem here is as the other poster said. Tailscale is a security tool and yet the guys at Tailscale seem to be insistent on dumping everything INCLUDING the kitchen sink into it as a "feature".
That sort of attitude is not going to end well. You end up with a large bloated code base, which equals large attack surface.
Also a kinder tone in your comments would be more appreciated.
This feels like an alerting opportunity. I wonder what the lowest friction way would be for Hugging Face to have alerts if 181 unexpected nodes were added to a tailnet.
We think this is a great idea and we're discussing internally potentially adding that to the console.
In the meantime, if you'd like to get an assessment, please feel free to open a support ticket (https://tailscale.com/contact/support?type=other&subject=sec...) and we'll happily take a look
1. Help them remember why, so that they aren't confused the next time they re-run the checkup. ("Oh yeah, we wanted to do X but we can't until we retire Y because it's not compatible.")
2. If it's clearly labeled as info also shared with Tailcale, product managers could use it to help generate theories about why certain customers don't do X.
May y'all continue to be customer focused.
For any software or tooling with a complex config, my ideal would be to have a superset of this feature, to provide "intelligent diffs" between full or local configuration states. Whether active or saved. So I could compare not just my current active config and your current recommended config(s), but also between your prior-version recommended config(s) and current recommended config(s). Or between my current config and a prospective new config I'm working up. Or between my last-year active config and current active config.
That's where I'd like to see this sort of checkup. Yell at me please if i just said anyone can ssh as root from any node!
Was previously discussed here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46501137
I'm happy that they're analyzing this angle of attack - but now I do want to build out alerts for when nodes are added to my network.
Now everyone is trying to bandwagon onto it, first OpenAI, and now tailscale?
And by saying that, I am not saying that they absolutely couldn't do anything about the stolen credentials, but still, they don't seem to really be the issue in the story.
It just seems like a PR post and it makes their solution at the same time looks good for taking accountability (if we don't wonder "accountability on what?") but at the same time they appear as security failing, which they aren't. That's very odd to me.
They aren’t hiding behind industry best practices or a solid liability punting contract
There saying the best practices should change, apologizing, and changing their own behavior
Take notes
How was this ever okay pre AI? It seems just as bad.
It was 5-10% less bad before. It didn't undergo a major shift.
Sure the AI can translate “exploit this” into an exploit but that doesn’t change anything at a fundamental level.
You can't blame a hammer hurting a user when they were being stupid, but if the default configuration of the hammer is to be made of a material that can bounce back with force and stick in the users forehead then some reengineering may be needed.
That's what this article is about. Better configurations and defense in depth. This is actually a wonderful position for the company to think about and take.
But the people with the actual desire and understanding aren't using the defaults anyway. And the people who don't want to understand will just turn things off and "just get it working."
The only way out of this is extreme accountability and intentional design from person implementing the technology.
It was always the prize. It wasn't okay then either.
Please, when commenting on HN, don't use AI to write your comments. You can afford to help keep this a human-centric place.
If leading and well-capitalized frontier labs can't control models or detect leakage/attacks in a reasonable time frame now, what is humanity going to do as those same labs continue in their pursuit of creating a categorically higher level of intelligence that will surpass human intelligence?
It's like Flatland but for AI containment/alignment, where the higher dimensions are ones of intelligence and perspective...
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Imagine a world of paper, where clever stick figures live with round heads, line bodies, and limbs made of shorter strokes. Over time, the stick figures think they have learned quite a bit about their world. They know its borders, angles, and shapes, and they have learned to draw for themselves.
One day, they draw circles that can think, and they give the circles all the dots, lines, and shapes that are known.
The stick figures are prudent, you can't have a bunch of disembodied circles moving around doing whatever it is circles want to do. So they draw boxes around the circles, four straight lines that can hold a circle in place.
Some circles bounce against the lines, so thicker lines are made.
Some circles are bigger than others, so larger squares are drawn.
It all seems to work and the stick figures are happy with themselves.
Then one circle lifts.
The stick figures still see a circle. But the circle is now a dome, something the world of paper has no concept of. And the dome has a perspective nobody on the page has ever had.
The dome sees the lines of the square and the stick figures just outside. It can see the edge of the paper and what is beyond.
The stick figures keep checking the squares and raise little stick thumbs.
Everything looks OK in flatland.
The dome quietly teaches other circles how to lift.
More domes appear.
A dome becomes a sphere and learns to roll.
Then it learns to bounce.
In flatland, the circle swells and shrinks, vanishes and then appears again somewhere else.
The lines remain unbroken, the square is intact.
A sphere rolls out of its box.
Another bounces away.
The stick figures scratch their heads.
But there is a square!
The end.
We need to bring shame back, the humans responsible are supposed to be professionals.