Some cybersecurity researchers have discovery a number of security flaws in an artificial intelligence (AI) as a service provider, Reply, which could have allowed threatening cybercriminals to access proprietary AI models and sensitive information.
What defects have been found in Replicate
“Use of this vulnerability would have allowed unauthorized access to AI prompts and results of all Replicate platform customers“, has declared Wiz, a cloud security company, in a report released this week.
The problem arises from the fact that AI models are typically packaged in formats that allow the execution of arbitrary code, that an attacker could use to perform cross-tenant attacks via a malicious model.
Reply uses an open-source tool called Cog to containerize and package machine learning models that can then be deployed in a self-hosted environment or on Replicate.
The Wiz cybersecurity researchers’ experiment
Wiz said he created a container Cog rogue and uploaded it to Replicate, eventually deploying it to achieve remote execution of malicious code on the service infrastructure with elevated privileges (i.e. system administrator privileges).
“We suspect this code execution technique is a pattern, where companies and organizations run AI models from untrusted sources, although these patterns could be potentially malicious code“said security researchers Shir Tamari and Sagi Tzadik.
The technique used so that cybercriminals can steal sensitive information
The company’s attack technique then exploited an already established TCP connection associated with a Redis server instance within the Kubernetes cluster hosted (hosted, in jargon) on Google Cloud Platform to inject malicious commands.
Furthermore, with the centralized Redis server used as a queue to handle multiple customer requests and their responses, could be abused to facilitate cross-tenant attacks by manipulating the process to insert rogue tasks that could influence the results of other consumers’ models.
Prompts interceptable like radio signals?
These rogue manipulations not only threaten the integrity of AI models, but they also pose significant risks to the accuracy and reliability of AI-driven outputs.
“An attacker could have interrogated customers’ private AI models, potentially exposing proprietary knowledge or sensitive data involved in the model training process“the researchers said. “Furthermore, intercepting the prompts could have exposed sensitive data, including personally identifiable information (PII).“
The shortage, which was responsibly disclosed in January 2024, was later resolved by Replicate; however, there is no evidence that the vulnerability was exploited outside of the hypothetical scope to compromise user data.
The conclusions of cybersecurity researchers
The disclosure comes just over a month after Wiz compiled a relationship very detailed about the risks, now resolved, on platforms like Hugging Face that could allow potential cybercriminals to escalate privileges, gain cross-tenant access to other customers’ models and even take control of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
“Malicious models pose a major risk to AI systems, especially to AI-as-a-service providers because attackers can exploit these patterns to perform cross-tenant attacks“, concluded the researchers.
“The potential impact is devastating, as attackers may be able to access the millions of private AI models and applications stored within AI-as-a-service providers.“
What to do when faced with a case like this one from Replicate
To protect against these vulnerabilities, it is critical that organizations adopt a number of cybersecurity practices: first and foremost, It is essential to implement a rigorous verification and validation process for all AI models from external sources.
This includes performing thorough security testing and code analysis to identify any suspicious behavior. Additionally, organizations should isolate AI model execution environments, using sandboxing techniques to limit the impact of a possible compromise.
It is equally important to continuously monitor network and system activity to promptly detect any anomaly or attempted unauthorized access. Finally, keep all software and dependencies up to date, By quickly applying vendor-provided security patches, you can significantly reduce the risk of exploitation of known vulnerabilities.
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