We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub in 25 minutes

> Baseten handled this well. The timeline was:

> 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

> [pen-testing agent] came back with an active GitHub personal access token for basetenbot. 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.

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.

…by finding an admin token in logs.

That is great marketing for strix, pretty bad for baseten. I don't think someone can have a better story to advertise their own security product. Did not know about strix but I am going to look it up now. Might add it to my stack.

Is this legal? I know I can’t try and break into my neighbors house even if I have no intent of going inside and stealing once I break the lock.

It may make sense to change security practices so nothing has long term access. Everything should be rotated monthly, and maybe within a few years, hourly.

We really are entering the AI economy.

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

So often recent breaches involve Github in one way or another. How is it still considered a sane choice to host anything proprietary there? If your business is built around open source, ok, put a mirror on Github. But CI/CD, gitops, FDEs' stuff have no place on a public cloud. C-level execs may not know bits from bytes, but by now they should've understood that this is akin to storing ammonium nitrate in the open air.

We were (and still are) considering them as an inference provider and did a quick check first... but kudos to their team for the fast patch

Yeah I have seen this issue a few times. If you use Docker build arguments that way add `--provenance=false` to get rid of all that build metadata. Build secrets are still better since they allow you to scope the secret inside of the Dockerfile. Also, the metadata can be useful to inspect images.

Just signed up for strix, is it common for these type of products to want access to my Github repo's? Shouldn't the attack surface be outside them?

A Markdown-as-a-Service where the interface is a Docker container.

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.

I wonder what model was used for this. Also as far as I know Baseten does not have any abliterated models in their repertoire.

This sounds interesting and twisted in some sense

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

i quite liked using strix. last time i tried it, deepseek was a mess and bloated the context with nonsense. that was ~5 months ago, i wonder how it performs now

An easily preventable issue with proper engineering culture around defense in depth and principle of least privilege, awful look on Baseten here.

Kudos for Strix to find it, and especially with how it chose to disclose and report it.

> We build Strix, an autonomous hacking again.

> 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

> So Strix enumerated hosts, looked through certificate logs, mapped the full surface.

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.

Baseten carries the Soc 2 Type II and HIPAA Compliant logos on its front page. They also have logos for customers including: OpenEvidence (medical related, used by almost 2/3 of physicians in the US, claim HIPAA compliance), Harvey (legal related, claim "binding terms on data protection, data access, incident response SLAs, and other controls aligned with SOC2, ISO, GDPR and other standards.")

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?

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