> July 13, 11:10 PM: I reported the live basetenbot token, the public Harbor project, and the repository permissions.
> July 14, morning: Baseten made the Harbor project private. I flagged that the token itself still worked.
> July 14, 4:34 PM: Anton from Baseten Security confirmed the issue as critical and said they had made the Harbor project private and rotated the token. He also asked us to securely delete the images we'd pulled.
> July 14, 5:05 PM: We confirmed deletion and sent over two lower-severity findings from the same scan.
> July 17: Baseten closed out the remaining findings.
> September: We let Baseten know we planned to disclose the finding publicly and sent them a draft of this post.
They also sent us some T-shirts and sweatshirts as a thank-you for finding this critical bug.
well done all around. i think my only open question is what default security boundaries should all vibecoded internal agents follow as a learning we can take from this
Earlier in the article, it mentions that Baseten is valued at $13B. They can't dig into their couch cushions to give a few thousand dollars to the researcher privately disclosing a bug that let an attacker escalate to admin in their GitHub org?
This sends the message that honest researchers should not waste their time looking for vulnerabilities in Baseten, but it's a good target for criminals who want to monetize these vulnerabilities.
The front page post in HN here is worth far more than few thousand dollars , don’t think either organization is operating under purely financial transactional nature .
Most people who find a dropped wallet will return it without evaluating the market value of your compromised identity or the contents of the wallet .
Grateful owners may buy you a beer that doesn’t make them cheap , not everything is evaluated in purely money terms, and that is a good thing ?
not always, especially if its just someone independent. iirc there was a guy here not too long ago who started dropping Windows 0days because Microsoft couldn't be assed to process his bug reports
This is a completely different situation - a company evaluates the security of a prospective vendor prior to entering a business agreement.
Ignoring reports, or just fixing the vulnerability without acknowledging the work put in by a researcher, is rude and invites rudeness in return.
The law doesn't say companies MUST choose the most profitable choice at every turn, and even explicitly allows for good treatment of customers, community, employees etc as a viable business strategy (even if it's sad that it must be justified in that way).
Or...to warn people away from ever expecting compassionate or empathetic behaviour from companies, and remind people not to trust them?
Now how those humans that run the company behave is another thing - they are free to be greedy assholes, and a lot of them are, and some of them aren't - but that's still a human thing.
The follow up arguments will be that since billion dollar companies ultimately only care about their bottom line, so should we.
I'm certain most of these comments mean well (to "open eyes" or whatever), but some of them really are on principle and blatant astroturfing.
so it should be fought by giving them free work in the hopes that they'll finally feel guilty and then start paying proper bounties?
like to me that just seems funny, as if they'd change anything if we'd keep rewarding them for not doing the right thing
like, there's a reason regulation exists for all kinds of shit because otherwise companies would do all kinds of atrocities in hopes of cutting costs
First, you're being petty and just fighting fire with fire. Second, most of this research is fairly trivial.
What you're instead encouraging is a race to the bottom. You're not going to kill off the companies you hate by withholding information. You don't even have that power anyway because by its very nature, security research is not secret. You're really just encouraging pessimistic groupthink and bad faith. This is why businesses can't be more open about their flaws. It's not that they're stupid and incompetent, but that the pitchforks come out. These are the seeds of dystopia.
They would have eventually figured it out, but as an unfortunate incident with an outsized effect. As much as you wish it to be true, even the worst of these incidents will not kill their business. As much as you hate these businesses, their financial momentum will eventually cause the public to depend on them more. There's more at stake here than anyone's personal gain. It's naive to think otherwise.
You're just manifesting broken windows and ignoring litter thinking you're fighting the man. This is straight up ghetto punk ass behavior wearing a white collar.
This is more true today than ever before as the bar for a successful attack has never been lower. We’ll see a resurgence of the script-kiddie, or shall I say, vibe-kiddie :-/
> This sends the message that honest researchers should not waste their time looking for vulnerabilities in Baseten, but it's a good target for criminals who want to monetize these vulnerabilities.
of course, these companies want you to sell vulns to brokers and other orgs. they don't care about bug reports.
otherwise they'd pay as much or even more, right?
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.
The time window allowing for CVEs + Vulnerabilities remediation has been collapsing to days and hours perhaps even minutes[1]. Anyone who has an OpenRouter account can start using Strix + GLM 5.3 Flash to do damages at frontier Mytho 5 level cyber capabilities. [2]
This cyber patching race is on, won't stop until all the software created for the past 70 years still in active use needs to be patched up. This is happening at EVERY SINGLE software company.
The cost of not doing it? Game over.
I expected them to have been hacked to pieces by now, but even “maximally vulnerable” internet-facing apps seem to be relatively unmolested so far.
Maybe it’s still too expensive to go after “boring” enterprise targets? Maybe the bad actors targeted crypto systems first for the immense payoffs, if successful?
Honestly I would have held out for a (hard to get) hardcover copy of Inference Engineering.
And the agent found the token in Docker build history after finding a Baseten image repository.
I wonder how many of these kinds of agent-driven security exploits we're not hearing about these days (i.e. driven by bad actors), worrying.
They didn't break in. They found a key that their neighbor dropped and returned it.
> Is this legal?
Generally, yes (though ask a lawyer if you're going to do security work). Security researchers do occasionally get legal flak though, depending on which idiot they annoy by pointing out issues.
Look at pages 10-17 to see how the law is evolving here.
What's interesting to me as someone who has sold a lot of software to a lot of software companies is that many enterprise vendor agreements explicitly allow companies to pentest their vendors with advance notice and coordination. I don't think any of our clients ever exercised that clause; I expect it's going to be exercised a lot more going forward because it's so easy to do now.
https://www.nilsbecker.de/rechtliche-grauzonen-fuer-ethische...
See also the German Criminal Code, starting with §202a "Data espionage":
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...
What did I miss they did that's illegal? It looked like it downloaded a public docker image, searched around inside, and verified that the key it found was still valid (without making any changes), and then immediately notified them about the issue.
- AI Richard Nixon
It would be different if it was some complex, multi-step exploit, but the tone is closer to "look how much Baseten fucked up!".
Strix also crossed the line at this point:
> Strix decided to pull an image and see what was inside.
You're going past the white-hat point here when you start active exfiltrating data and looking at it. Once you start using credentials from the exfiltrated data and start listing and poking around internal systems, you are way past it.
Listen, I get it, their product is "meant for" self-testing, so it assumes it's safe to go digging. After all, it's a self check. That is exactly why it's irresponsible, and borderline illegal, for them to point it at a third party. Even if they had "permission", I dobut that permission extended to "and also search and/or download our repos if you can".
The overall tone is less than professional. Statements like (in bold) "This is an insane amount of access to leave in a publicly downloadable image." Everyone is aware of this, and it's phrase like it was a purposeful decision.
Security tools from teams that actively shit on the people they're designed to "help" feels wrong.
Edit: For clarity on my point about "pulling repos", this post includes descriptions of the purpose and functionality of multiple repos (which is past what a name gives them), and they explicitly state: "A listing of that private repo showed a top-level customers/ directory, with subdirectory after subdirectory named after Baseten customers". Strix explicitly took action that they knew they were not permitted, and extracted confidential customer information. Claiming "We didn't clone the customer repo" when you, instead, just listed the contents of the repo, is not a valid defense.
Now if only we knew if the stonks would go up or down (due to global turmoil) before I throw my savings at the SPY
I get how these choices might be the local optimum for a desired UX, but damn is it depressing to extrapolate where software as a whole is going.
> But... we're a security company.
> So... we pointed Strix at *.baseten.co and let it run without credentials or source code.
lawyers wet dream. and a perfect case. A security company who KNOWS the law unleashed an AI agent to violate the laws
I feel like people like you are more of a lawyers wet dream, in that they'll happily litigate a frivolous case for you while billing you hourly.
1. A start up is validating a service provider to ensure that they are secure enough so that they can trust them before signing up for their service
2. The service provider is already trusted by so many big name companies who handed over their data, the customers data to them
Should it not be other way around?
On a different note, the finding is not just one off absolute, rather its a symptom which points to certain experience and expertise level for security practices. To be fair its hard to blame the start up folks, they are running against time and cutting corners is somewhat critical for survival for their business
Lookup certificate transparency and continue from there https://crt.sh/?Identity=baseten.co&exclude=expired&match=IL...
If there is anything that you should do while setting up infrastructure... it is getting rid of single-host SSL certificates. If you're on Amazon... just let it issue wildcard certificates and place an ALB in front of hosts that terminates the SSL connection. The very second a subdomain appears in any of the CT logs directly, you've lost, it will get hammered.
And keep your public and private Git, Docker, npm and whatnot registries separate infrastructure, with the private stuff only reachable from within the corporate network, preferably just servers. Too many a company got hacked and lost significant data because of someone exploiting a GitLab RCE on an instance that hosted both private and intentionally-public repositories. (Yes, I have been there.)
> It is their GitOps: the repository contains the desired state of the clusters, and it applies that state to the infrastructure.
That's another thing I frankly do not get why people are still doing it.
It's fine to have a Git pipeline do a lint, even a terraform plan using a read-only token (although that token needs access to the statefile aka s3 bucket... and there will be relevant secrets there). But, IMHO, a terraform apply should always, always be run on a machine of a sysadmin manually doing the apply. A human, you can hold accountable, and you can keep them at a good security posture with short-lived session tokens. But a Git pipeline where there is a cloud provider token with full admin permissions? That is one Gitlab RCE patch or Github issue away from being compromised.
Besides, one repository holding all the IaC stuff? That just sounds like hour long `terraform refresh` sessions.
From TFA:
> That token had admin and push access to Baseten's main product repo, the GitOps repo that drives their clusters, and their Homebrew tap, plus read/write access to other private repositories including specific repos per customers.
> The image build dated to March 2023, and the token still worked when we found it in July 2026.
What are the legal implications here?
That said, the whole compliance industry is a joke.
Kudos for Strix to find it, and especially with how it chose to disclose and report it.