https://lemmy.world/post/49736885
If you follow AI news at all as part of your self-hosting interests, you may have become aware recently that open AI (the frontier lab between behind chat GPT) has admitted (loosely) culpability in an cyber attack against HuggingFace (the major repository of open-weight models.)
The details that present are somewhat sketchy, but the gist of it is that open AI seems to have given unrestricted access to a AI agent, which then attacked hugging face, who in a twist of deliciousness, used an open source agent to defend themselves.
I’d joke and tell you to make sure that you haven’t left any open ports on your router, but if you’re here reading this I think probably you know better than that.
Less comically, there’s a weird intersection here between self-hosting, sovereignty and encroachment by big tech that is worth pay attention to.
It should certainly spur people on to seriously consider self-hosting as much of their infrastructure as they can (and securing it) if this is the preview of things to come.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
I just wish I’d bought more SSDs.
Curious to know how self hosters can use local ai to find and repair/mitigate vulnerabilities on their personal networks. Anyone working in this space?
So far the only real vulnerabilities that Ai have spun up seem to be really obscure edge case privilege escalation bugs that have been around for ages but nobody discovered. They then get patched in days if not less. I would expect them to run out of low hanging fruit pretty soon.
Most of them can even be mitigated by preventing local access to a system.
There’s tools to audit your network and systems. You can setup a SIEM like Wazuh. It’ll tell you the same kind of stuff that have been good practice for a while and mitigate most of the ai assisted vulnerabilities.
Wow! That is a very intriguing question, and one that I have never considered before. Just spitballing here but you could possibly use trad apps like Lynis, Greenbone, Nikto, etc. These apps often produce rather verbose and sometimes cryptic output, i know Lynis sure does. So, you could use a prompt like:
‘You are a security analyst. Review the following Nmap scan results. Identify services running outdated or potentially vulnerable versions, suggest likely CVEs, and prioritize findings by risk.’
Then use something like llama3.1:70b, mistral-nemo or deepseek-coder-v2, and pipe your security scans into your local AI. You could feed it your NGINX, docker configs, pFsense firewall rules in and ask the model to audit them.
IDK, that’s a very good question I think. It’ll be interesting to see what others have to comment.
I’ve done this (asked a frontier model red team my server), and it just gave me false alarms that I went investigating and weren’t really issues (would’ve been an issue if I had a very specific configuration, but not generally). They produce a lot of noise, so you still have to somewhat understand what you’re looking at/for. It didn’t find any legitimate issues, which is good I guess.
I’d buy that. I mean, Lynis produces volumes of info, not all are really related to your server.