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swyxtoday at 6:24 PM4 repliesview on HN

> 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


Replies

taohtoday at 8:23 PM

I’d treat a vibecoded agent like an untrusted CI job, not like a junior employee: repo-scoped identity, read-only by default, no inherited Actions token or production secrets. Any operation that turns a read into a write should require approval outside the agent’s control and produce an auditable diff. Network egress belongs in the boundary too. Read-only access is not much protection if the agent can send everything it reads to an arbitrary endpoint.

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mtlynchtoday at 6:57 PM

Good in terms of prompt communication and fix. Absurdly bad in terms of reward.

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.

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polynomialtoday at 7:20 PM

> They also sent us some T-shirts and sweatshirts as a thank-you for finding this critical bug.

Honestly I would have held out for a (hard to get) hardcover copy of Inference Engineering.