alt Hacker NewsI feel like such prompt injections are really just another variant of the supply chain attack. Instead of selecting for bitcoin afficionados, this one hits AI fans. This will be fashionable for a little while but if AI continues to gain mindshare it will eventually be project suicide (at least to the extent the project exists in any part to serve third parties) to pull tricks like this.
I'm not sure it's anything to fret about. Someone who has the ability to inject a prompt into your AI probably has the ability to run arbitrary code as your user. The prompt injection is the strictly less worrying part of the exposure you have.
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the underlying root cause of most supply chain attacks in this era seems to be expecting something of value in exchange of nothing.
Under such expectations some will volunteer to give value, but many more will volunteer to give something that looks like what you ask, but which extracts value instead.
I relate it to a recent poker strategy development which came from game theory, it turns out that you can play in an unexploitable manner, but it will usually result in ties, and lost time and money to rake, and theoretically any attempt to exploit another player, leaves you exploitable to another player. The classical example is rock paper scissors, unexploitable strategy is to play randomly with p=1/3 for each choice, however if one really wishes to win more often than their opponent, they have to guess, and if in that guessing they choose an option with 100% certainty, they become exploitable to someone choosing another option with 100% certainty.
In effect the very act of attempting to extract value from free software, is the very act that leaves one vulnerable to being extracted value from.
> it will eventually be project suicide to pull tricks like this
The only reason that the jqwik incident didn't blow up much outside of the tech sphere is because it is a relatively niche library and there wasn't damage. If something like React or numpy did the same thing and real code got deleted, chaos would ensue.
The author admitted there were personal and professional consequences in their blog post despite the small surface area.