> July 13, 11:10 PM: I reported the live basetenbot token, the public Harbor project, and the repository permissions.
> July 14, morning: Baseten made the Harbor project private. I flagged that the token itself still worked.
> July 14, 4:34 PM: Anton from Baseten Security confirmed the issue as critical and said they had made the Harbor project private and rotated the token. He also asked us to securely delete the images we'd pulled.
> July 14, 5:05 PM: We confirmed deletion and sent over two lower-severity findings from the same scan.
> July 17: Baseten closed out the remaining findings.
> September: We let Baseten know we planned to disclose the finding publicly and sent them a draft of this post.
They also sent us some T-shirts and sweatshirts as a thank-you for finding this critical bug.
well done all around. i think my only open question is what default security boundaries should all vibecoded internal agents follow as a learning we can take from this
I’d treat a vibecoded agent like an untrusted CI job, not like a junior employee: repo-scoped identity, read-only by default, no inherited Actions token or production secrets. Any operation that turns a read into a write should require approval outside the agent’s control and produce an auditable diff. Network egress belongs in the boundary too. Read-only access is not much protection if the agent can send everything it reads to an arbitrary endpoint.
Good in terms of prompt communication and fix. Absurdly bad in terms of reward.
Earlier in the article, it mentions that Baseten is valued at $13B. They can't dig into their couch cushions to give a few thousand dollars to the researcher privately disclosing a bug that let an attacker escalate to admin in their GitHub org?
This sends the message that honest researchers should not waste their time looking for vulnerabilities in Baseten, but it's a good target for criminals who want to monetize these vulnerabilities.
Swag packages like these are a token of appreciation not a reward.
The front page post in HN here is worth far more than few thousand dollars , don’t think either organization is operating under purely financial transactional nature .
Most people who find a dropped wallet will return it without evaluating the market value of your compromised identity or the contents of the wallet .
Grateful owners may buy you a beer that doesn’t make them cheap , not everything is evaluated in purely money terms, and that is a good thing ?
> The front page post in HN here is worth far more than few thousand dollars , don’t think either organization is operating under purely financial transactional nature .
not always, especially if its just someone independent. iirc there was a guy here not too long ago who started dropping Windows 0days because Microsoft couldn't be assed to process his bug reports
Wallets usually belong to real people with lives. We can empathize with them. Companies are not people. And they also don't and can't empathize with you.
"and can't empathize with you" - I don't really understand why such a perception of companies has been regurgitated and reinforced so much in US public, to the point where it's a blank excuse from ever expecting such a thing from a company. It's not true that it can't. The only reason to keep repeating that kind of worldview is to absolve companies behaving in shitty, toxic or downright evil ways.
The law doesn't say companies MUST choose the most profitable choice at every turn, and even explicitly allows for good treatment of customers, community, employees etc as a viable business strategy (even if it's sad that it must be justified in that way).
Yeah companies need to quickly understand that having good actors try and hack you is a good thing - those hacks get reported and another door gets sealed shut for bad actors.
This is more true today than ever before as the bar for a successful attack has never been lower. We’ll see a resurgence of the script-kiddie, or shall I say, vibe-kiddie :-/
> This sends the message that honest researchers should not waste their time looking for vulnerabilities in Baseten, but it's a good target for criminals who want to monetize these vulnerabilities.
of course, these companies want you to sell vulns to brokers and other orgs. they don't care about bug reports.
> [pen-testing agent] came back with an active GitHub personal access token for basetenbot. That token had admin and push access to Baseten's main product repo, the GitOps repo that drives their clusters, and their Homebrew tap, plus read/write access to other private repositories including specific repos per customers.
And the agent found the token in Docker build history after finding a Baseten image repository.
I wonder how many of these kinds of agent-driven security exploits we're not hearing about these days (i.e. driven by bad actors), worrying.
That is great marketing for strix, pretty bad for baseten.
I don't think someone can have a better story to advertise their own security product.
Did not know about strix but I am going to look it up now.
Might add it to my stack.
> I know I can’t try and break into my neighbors house even if I have no intent of going inside and stealing once I break the lock.
They didn't break in. They found a key that their neighbor dropped and returned it.
> Is this legal?
Generally, yes (though ask a lawyer if you're going to do security work). Security researchers do occasionally get legal flak though, depending on which idiot they annoy by pointing out issues.
It's implied (but sadly not stated) in the post that they asked for baseten's permission before conducting this research.
What's interesting to me as someone who has sold a lot of software to a lot of software companies is that many enterprise vendor agreements explicitly allow companies to pentest their vendors with advance notice and coordination. I don't think any of our clients ever exercised that clause; I expect it's going to be exercised a lot more going forward because it's so easy to do now.
It's not, in most juridictions at least, but it would be insanely stupid for baseten to sue (and the hacker would probably not get much more than a slap on the wrist given that they weren't malicious).
What did I miss they did that's illegal? It looked like it downloaded a public docker image, searched around inside, and verified that the key it found was still valid (without making any changes), and then immediately notified them about the issue.
If there is anything that was a crime (and it totally depends on jurisdiction), it was verifying the key. They used it to see what it could access, and by using it they had unauthorised access to a system
It may make sense to change security practices so nothing has long term access. Everything should be rotated monthly, and maybe within a few years, hourly.
So often recent breaches involve Github in one way or another. How is it still considered a sane choice to host anything proprietary there? If your business is built around open source, ok, put a mirror on Github. But CI/CD, gitops, FDEs' stuff have no place on a public cloud. C-level execs may not know bits from bytes, but by now they should've understood that this is akin to storing ammonium nitrate in the open air.
Yeah I have seen this issue a few times. If you use Docker build arguments that way add `--provenance=false` to get rid of all that build metadata. Build secrets are still better since they allow you to scope the secret inside of the Dockerfile. Also, the metadata can be useful to inspect images.
The bot snippets talk claudish. I'd say Opus 5. But they must be Cyber Verification Program approved by Anthropic I suppose for the LLM not to block them.
1. A start up is validating a service provider to ensure that they are secure enough so that they can trust them before signing up for their service
2. The service provider is already trusted by so many big name companies who handed over their data, the customers data to them
Should it not be other way around?
On a different note, the finding is not just one off absolute, rather its a symptom which points to certain experience and expertise level for security practices. To be fair its hard to blame the start up folks, they are running against time and cutting corners is somewhat critical for survival for their business
i quite liked using strix. last time i tried it, deepseek was a mess and bloated the context with nonsense. that was ~5 months ago, i wonder how it performs now
if i find someones key on the ground and take the key and walk into their house and poke around, and make sure to leave a letter, this is a good thing?
> So Strix enumerated hosts, looked through certificate logs, mapped the full surface.
If there is anything that you should do while setting up infrastructure... it is getting rid of single-host SSL certificates. If you're on Amazon... just let it issue wildcard certificates and place an ALB in front of hosts that terminates the SSL connection. The very second a subdomain appears in any of the CT logs directly, you've lost, it will get hammered.
And keep your public and private Git, Docker, npm and whatnot registries separate infrastructure, with the private stuff only reachable from within the corporate network, preferably just servers. Too many a company got hacked and lost significant data because of someone exploiting a GitLab RCE on an instance that hosted both private and intentionally-public repositories. (Yes, I have been there.)
> It is their GitOps: the repository contains the desired state of the clusters, and it applies that state to the infrastructure.
That's another thing I frankly do not get why people are still doing it.
It's fine to have a Git pipeline do a lint, even a terraform plan using a read-only token (although that token needs access to the statefile aka s3 bucket... and there will be relevant secrets there). But, IMHO, a terraform apply should always, always be run on a machine of a sysadmin manually doing the apply. A human, you can hold accountable, and you can keep them at a good security posture with short-lived session tokens. But a Git pipeline where there is a cloud provider token with full admin permissions? That is one Gitlab RCE patch or Github issue away from being compromised.
Besides, one repository holding all the IaC stuff? That just sounds like hour long `terraform refresh` sessions.
Baseten carries the Soc 2 Type II and HIPAA Compliant logos on its front page. They also have logos for customers including: OpenEvidence (medical related, used by almost 2/3 of physicians in the US, claim HIPAA compliance), Harvey (legal related, claim "binding terms on data protection, data access, incident response SLAs, and other controls aligned with SOC2, ISO, GDPR and other standards.")
From TFA:
> That token had admin and push access to Baseten's main product repo, the GitOps repo that drives their clusters, and their Homebrew tap, plus read/write access to other private repositories including specific repos per customers.
> The image build dated to March 2023, and the token still worked when we found it in July 2026.
Given the build is from 2023 one would expect that at least the token would have been rotated, and I suspect some of these compliance checks do require rotation of tokens/passwords.
That said, the whole compliance industry is a joke.
> July 13, 11:10 PM: I reported the live basetenbot token, the public Harbor project, and the repository permissions.
> July 14, morning: Baseten made the Harbor project private. I flagged that the token itself still worked.
> July 14, 4:34 PM: Anton from Baseten Security confirmed the issue as critical and said they had made the Harbor project private and rotated the token. He also asked us to securely delete the images we'd pulled.
> July 14, 5:05 PM: We confirmed deletion and sent over two lower-severity findings from the same scan.
> July 17: Baseten closed out the remaining findings.
> September: We let Baseten know we planned to disclose the finding publicly and sent them a draft of this post.
They also sent us some T-shirts and sweatshirts as a thank-you for finding this critical bug.
well done all around. i think my only open question is what default security boundaries should all vibecoded internal agents follow as a learning we can take from this
Earlier in the article, it mentions that Baseten is valued at $13B. They can't dig into their couch cushions to give a few thousand dollars to the researcher privately disclosing a bug that let an attacker escalate to admin in their GitHub org?
This sends the message that honest researchers should not waste their time looking for vulnerabilities in Baseten, but it's a good target for criminals who want to monetize these vulnerabilities.
The front page post in HN here is worth far more than few thousand dollars , don’t think either organization is operating under purely financial transactional nature .
Most people who find a dropped wallet will return it without evaluating the market value of your compromised identity or the contents of the wallet .
Grateful owners may buy you a beer that doesn’t make them cheap , not everything is evaluated in purely money terms, and that is a good thing ?
not always, especially if its just someone independent. iirc there was a guy here not too long ago who started dropping Windows 0days because Microsoft couldn't be assed to process his bug reports
The law doesn't say companies MUST choose the most profitable choice at every turn, and even explicitly allows for good treatment of customers, community, employees etc as a viable business strategy (even if it's sad that it must be justified in that way).
The follow up arguments will be that since billion dollar companies ultimately only care about their bottom line, so should we.
I'm certain most of these comments mean well (to "open eyes" or whatever), but some of them really are on principle and blatant astroturfing.
so it should be fought by giving them free work in the hopes that they'll finally feel guilty and then start paying proper bounties?
like to me that just seems funny, as if they'd change anything if we'd keep rewarding them for not doing the right thing
like, there's a reason regulation exists for all kinds of shit because otherwise companies would do all kinds of atrocities in hopes of cutting costs
This is more true today than ever before as the bar for a successful attack has never been lower. We’ll see a resurgence of the script-kiddie, or shall I say, vibe-kiddie :-/
> This sends the message that honest researchers should not waste their time looking for vulnerabilities in Baseten, but it's a good target for criminals who want to monetize these vulnerabilities.
of course, these companies want you to sell vulns to brokers and other orgs. they don't care about bug reports.
otherwise they'd pay as much or even more, right?
Honestly I would have held out for a (hard to get) hardcover copy of Inference Engineering.
And the agent found the token in Docker build history after finding a Baseten image repository.
I wonder how many of these kinds of agent-driven security exploits we're not hearing about these days (i.e. driven by bad actors), worrying.
They didn't break in. They found a key that their neighbor dropped and returned it.
> Is this legal?
Generally, yes (though ask a lawyer if you're going to do security work). Security researchers do occasionally get legal flak though, depending on which idiot they annoy by pointing out issues.
What's interesting to me as someone who has sold a lot of software to a lot of software companies is that many enterprise vendor agreements explicitly allow companies to pentest their vendors with advance notice and coordination. I don't think any of our clients ever exercised that clause; I expect it's going to be exercised a lot more going forward because it's so easy to do now.
What did I miss they did that's illegal? It looked like it downloaded a public docker image, searched around inside, and verified that the key it found was still valid (without making any changes), and then immediately notified them about the issue.
Now if only we knew if the stonks would go up or down (due to global turmoil) before I throw my savings at the SPY
I get how these choices might be the local optimum for a desired UX, but damn is it depressing to extrapolate where software as a whole is going.
Lookup certificate transparency and continue from there https://crt.sh/?Identity=baseten.co&exclude=expired&match=IL...
1. A start up is validating a service provider to ensure that they are secure enough so that they can trust them before signing up for their service
2. The service provider is already trusted by so many big name companies who handed over their data, the customers data to them
Should it not be other way around?
On a different note, the finding is not just one off absolute, rather its a symptom which points to certain experience and expertise level for security practices. To be fair its hard to blame the start up folks, they are running against time and cutting corners is somewhat critical for survival for their business
Kudos for Strix to find it, and especially with how it chose to disclose and report it.
> But... we're a security company.
> So... we pointed Strix at *.baseten.co and let it run without credentials or source code.
lawyers wet dream. and a perfect case. A security company who KNOWS the law unleashed an AI agent to violate the laws
I feel like people like you are more of a lawyers wet dream, in that they'll happily litigate a frivolous case for you while billing you hourly.
If there is anything that you should do while setting up infrastructure... it is getting rid of single-host SSL certificates. If you're on Amazon... just let it issue wildcard certificates and place an ALB in front of hosts that terminates the SSL connection. The very second a subdomain appears in any of the CT logs directly, you've lost, it will get hammered.
And keep your public and private Git, Docker, npm and whatnot registries separate infrastructure, with the private stuff only reachable from within the corporate network, preferably just servers. Too many a company got hacked and lost significant data because of someone exploiting a GitLab RCE on an instance that hosted both private and intentionally-public repositories. (Yes, I have been there.)
> It is their GitOps: the repository contains the desired state of the clusters, and it applies that state to the infrastructure.
That's another thing I frankly do not get why people are still doing it.
It's fine to have a Git pipeline do a lint, even a terraform plan using a read-only token (although that token needs access to the statefile aka s3 bucket... and there will be relevant secrets there). But, IMHO, a terraform apply should always, always be run on a machine of a sysadmin manually doing the apply. A human, you can hold accountable, and you can keep them at a good security posture with short-lived session tokens. But a Git pipeline where there is a cloud provider token with full admin permissions? That is one Gitlab RCE patch or Github issue away from being compromised.
Besides, one repository holding all the IaC stuff? That just sounds like hour long `terraform refresh` sessions.
From TFA:
> That token had admin and push access to Baseten's main product repo, the GitOps repo that drives their clusters, and their Homebrew tap, plus read/write access to other private repositories including specific repos per customers.
> The image build dated to March 2023, and the token still worked when we found it in July 2026.
What are the legal implications here?
That said, the whole compliance industry is a joke.