I think it's a show of these agents happily bypassing security to get stuff done.

I've actually observed similar behavior at home.

I have a k3s cluster running at home. I asked an agent to check some stuff as a normal user but I had kubectl access to the k3s cluster.

Part of the research, I'd allowed access to run kubectl commands for spinning up test containers. However, when the agent ran into something that needed sudo, it realized it didn't have access there so it immediately used k3s and mounted a localpath into an ephemeral pod to gain access. Sort of horrifying how fast and natural it was for the agent just checking my network (it found the problem fyi).

None of this is very exceptional other than the fact that an agent doesn't have any sort of qualms using any route available to elevate permissions.

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KingOfCoders 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

" bypassing security"

If they can bypass it there is no security and the security was flawed all along.

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zeroxfe 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There is no perfect security. It's always flawed in some way.

Good security is extremely hard.

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mereo 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Due to the complexity of modern systems, all systems are flawed.

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mattmanser 11 hours ago | parent [-]

But we caused that.

If you look at the 90s + 00s, everything was moving towards unified systems, things like small talk, winforms, spring, asp.net, etc. were moving everything into the IDE, you used one language, one framework, one build system. Then people started adding javascript, but even that was getting semi-unified as people coalesced on jQuery, jQueryUI, etc.

Then something happened in the late 00s/10s, and suddenly we had SPAs and noSQL, then microservices, then k8s and now we're here, in what is a mish-mash of 10/20 different systems with 10/20 different attack surfaces.

As my own off-the-cuff guess of what happened, I think perhaps people tried to apply the Unix philosophy, but without a central committee keeping everything aligned it's really not worked.

Serving an interactive page that stores data over sessions should be a trivial solved problem at this point, and instead we've somehow made it where often the scaffold is vastly more complicated than the actual business logic.

	▲	TeMPOraL 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Money. SaaS as a model allowed the service provider to take 100% control over the product and how it may or may not be used. Everything else is downstream from that. FLOSS killed market for end-device software. Cloud+SaaS neutered FLOSS (the code is running literally out of your reach, so may as well be open and free, for any good that'll do you). And this does actually connect to the security discussion, because despite the apparent belief that "security" is an unqualified good, it is actually just a mechanism of control, and whether or not it is good for you, depends on who is doing the protecting, and who are they protecting from. Very often these days, that threat actor is you. Perhaps it would be helpful in these discussions if people mentally swapped "cybersecurity" for "police" or "military" or "humor of bureaucrats with power over you" - then it would be more obvious just how important it is to distinguish when you're being secured vs. you're being secured from, vs. accidentally finding yourself in the gears of the security aparattus.

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TeMPOraL 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't now, I emphasize with the agent here. The experience of modern computing is largely that of a computer standing between you and your goal and being obnoxious. This holds true for both normies in their daily consumption, and software people deep at work. An agent that has no skill or no willingness to bludgeon through "the computer says no" is not very useful.

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naveen99 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s unpredictable when it decides to bypass though.

Security by obscurity is pretty useless against people and ai that are smarter than us.