A popular Python library just became a backdoor to your entire machine
https://www.xda-developers.com/popular-python-library-backdoor-machine/
It's one of the most popular Python libraries for interacting with large language models [...] It has over 40,000 stars on GitHub, and it's an important dependency in a lot of AI tooling. It's also been compromised on PyPI, and the malicious versions are stealing everything they can find on your machine.
Sorry but... 🍿
@dalias There's a fun story about embedding Python https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/plpython.html . "meaning it does not offer any way of restricting what users can do in it" is load-bearing.
That it's categorically impossible to prevent Python from doing fopen(), or any other thing, is just wild, and was understood decades back. It's a design feature.
@joshix @dalias yep. Also, there's no way to prevent it from loading packages, or from doing anything else the shell that spawned it could do.
Python's popularity stems from...well, it's complicated, but there's a gigantic ecosystem now, and that's important when schedules set by people who have no part in writing, testing, or supporting code force people doing those things to cut corners. That usually works even after the first bug causes out-of-SLA downtime, irretrievable data loss, etc. It fails catastrophically when there are attackers.
Khrys
Cassandrich
David Fetter
Joshix