ChatGPT Desktop forwards your SSH agent to remote machines

littlecranky67

I'd suggest to use ssh keys inside the secure enclave on macOS that require your fingerprint for every new session [0]. That way agents cannot initiate anything, and you will always be aware when a new ssh connection is being made. [0]: https://gist.github.com/arianvp/5f59f1783e3eaf1a2d4cd8e952bb...

recsv-heredoc

It's amazing how often product decisions head this way for the purposes of 'removing friction'. In security, friction is a GOOD thing. You want to have some ceremony to do things. It's pretty much inevitable that people will give up control for convenience. Look at Artifacts for example.

spwa4

Of course it does. That's what the codex <> chat merge is actually doing. But codex <> chat merge is what they're giving as the "real reason" for what actually is raising prices (a LOT, I might add) for all the subscriptions. Nobody wants it (certainly not applied globally to everything like it is), but they're still going to do it. I even know someone who works at OpenAI and there's apparently a few people trying to fight it at least internally. Given Sam Altman's speech about how he wants OpenAI pricing to work, I don't think this can be stopped. Btw: that is that you type something into ChatGPT and instead of subscription or per-token cost or anything like that, as soon as you type something in, anything, the way he sees it, ChatGPT would give you a cost for that specific answer and you'd agree or not. I just feel like this guy is an even worse example of not seeing the viewpoint of a normal (you know non-millionaire) person than even Google's leadership. Can I just say "I think Google is going to win from Altman", you know, despite OpenAI having the far superior technology. Because if there's one guy in the whole world that can destroy the advantages of OpenAI's engineering accomplishments for everyone else, it's this guy ...

Betelbuddy

They might have solved coding but they did not solve common sense.

m000

At this point, should cases like this even be news? Isn't that a fundamental security design issue? Local agent security guardrails appear to always be built around blacklists, which will always be unreliable and leaky. It is left as an exercise to the user to properly sandbox them. There may be some limited form of whitelisting, but often it is just a facade, as it is very coarse-grained. So, with tools with very broad capabilities (ssh, kubectl, gcloud, etc) you end up with the agent performing unwanted actions.

eosis

Things are awful for this at the moment. [Was the same for docker desktop at some point.]( https://rupertrutledge.com/posts/docker-sbx-s-ssh-security-i... ) Same for [devpod]( https://devpod.sh/ ) for sshing to devcontainers. They are particularly annoying because they just dump it into your config. Use an include statement to your own file for goodness sake. It was often not ideal in the old world. Now agents are doing everything in those boxes, it is kind of mad. I have my own utilities now for managing these sockets and files now to deal with this stuff.

VCFundedGenYer

Regular reminder to never download/install AI chatbot apps - they all work in a browser where they can be isolated. Do not let these things loose on your computer.

throwa356262

Doesn't matter how many 0-days chatgpt can find in the linux kernel when it also pulls things like this. Whoever told you AI has solved security was hallucinating.

yfontana

I don't understand what the linked pull request is supposed to prove, considering it was closed and not merged.

simoncion

This sucks, a lot, but you've gotta never run these tools as your ordinary daily-driver account. These tools are rather unpredictable and -because of the nature of the incredibly reckless development methodology- it's nearly impossible to understand every behavioral change in new versions of the ones that are largely or entirely vibecoded. [0] As others have said, it looks like the primary way the Major LLM Manufacturers have chosen to control these things is with a combination of great big blacklists and voluminous pleading, begging, and scolding. Most of us know the problems both with enumerating badness and with attempting to appeal to something that's incapable of care, sympathy, or shame. [0] For another example of this principle, go read the recent Jepsen report on ParticleDB.

Lukas_Skywalker

The Bitwarden desktop app has a built in SSH agent [1], which lets you store SSH keys inside Bitwarden. I have set the app to always ask me for confirmation when the key is requested. [1] https://bitwarden.com/help/ssh-agent/

iririririr

or "users running a program whose purpose is to eval commands received from a remote service, shocked that readable credentials are being read" anyone who thinks THIS is the security problem is mental.

carterschonwald

this is a normal ssh feature meant to allow keys to be used while keeping keys local … its actually a keystone of secure infrastructure setups, aka jump hosts. granted its meant for human or scripted uses, as is everything else

aweiher

What exactly does this five-month-old never-merged PR prove besides that 90% of people on HN are just reading the headline?

betterunix2

Another example of OpenAI giving little thought to security because they want "iteration speed" or whatever. It took decades of work just to bring Internet security up to the state it is (was?) in at this point, and it is hardly where it should be. AI adds new security concerns (e.g. prompt injection) that need to be addressed and we do not have great answers to that. Bringing us back to the state of security we had in the 90s while adding new problems might be the most shortsighted decision imaginable...

otterley

If this bothers you, it can be guarded against in your ssh config file: Host trusted-server HostName server.example.com ForwardAgent yes Host another-trusted-server HostName another.example.com ForwardAgent yes Host * ForwardAgent no

mbreese

I’m not sure this is quite the smoking gun. This PR was closed as not merged and the entire process is described as opt-in. Is there other evidence of Codex abusing or surreptitiously extending an ssh agent?

UndividedDev

Setting up fingerprint / password authentication via secretive for ssh key access made me realize how often these tools try to do something without explicitly asking

viccis

Back in my pen testing days, agent forwarding was a gift from heaven when I was on a Linux machine.

TacticalCoder

> The agent running on a remote machine can authenticate using your local SSH credentials. No it doesn't. I'm using and enforcing SSH U2F keys. You physically press on a Yubikey (or similar) or you don't authenticate. As for my own Git server, it's of course over SSH and it requires pressing the Yubikey too. As a sidenote as I do it from Magit I modified Magit to add a small but obvious message stating that the Yubikey probably awaits touching (otherwise it's easy to miss / not realize). The great thing with all these hacks and bad practices is that I believe, eventually, people are going to learn better security hygiene.