Outside of the initial wave of security vulnerabilities and scrambling, it seems like the logical outcome of this over time is likely vastly more secure vm environments?
That makes as much sense as saying that better gun technology results in body armor that can stop it. It might incentivize that, but in no way "results" in that; the fundamental technologys underpinning advancements in offense versus defense are fairly different.
This assumes your malefactors don't do malicious engineering, injects, social-agent engineering, etc.
This same assumption is built around the singularity, the TAM of 30Trillion, etc. It's the idea that complexity will some how collapse upon itself in some bizarre borg like collective.
They are more comparable to a computer worm than anything else. Very strange (and disrespectful imo) to make the jump to slavery. A gun can’t be used at all inside it’s safe so I’m not sure that makes sense. A better metaphor would be making sure gun ranges have backstops capable of stopping contemporary payloads and sufficient range controls to keep people from shooting at cars on the highway. Outside of that you need registration requirements and gun control to make sure you can mitigate and track down perpetrators of gun crimes off the range. If they’re to be used in active conflict you need laws of war to govern the use of lethal force.
IMO the obvious answer is formally verified security.
We can do this today for user mode, and we can mostly do it for ARM64 virtualization. It will be a while and would require substantial assistance from Intel or AMD to achieve it for x86 virtualization because the hardware is Too Darn Complicated and Too Poorly Specified.
Formal verification of the hardware should also be possible.
Interesting article, but there's little question the "agent computer" pattern is only going to grow.
Security is a major concern but I don't see why we aren't already "good enough" with a sandbox VM, separate gateway for secrets and remote service access, and a single tenant using frontier models that have safety checks built in plus not trying to hack themselves.
I put up more thoughts on architecture and security here and would love to learn if I'm missing anything.
I code review vibe coded stuff for companies quite often and many people tell me confidently the AI runs safely inside a container & VM, while it really doesn't. They don't have any way to check as they don't know how things work, but the AI mentioned virtual machines and containers and that's what they remembered.
Because your AI is trying to be helpful and as we all know the way to hell is paved with good intentions. The canonical example is probably the agent that runs out of diskspace and starts deleting stuff outside its workspace which is obviously not important for the task at hand.
The market is smaller (maybe, I'm not sure what the statistics are) but it would be interesting to see how Xen stacks up; also stuff like gVisor or libkrun. The latter is probably implicitly the same as Firecracker given the ancestry of the libraries used.
"An off-the-shelf VM is not enough to contain a modern, cyber-capable AI agent...us[e] a virtualization technology that was purposely built with a minimal attack surface and a focus on security, like Firecracker. I had the AI agent run against Firecracker. It was able to hardlock the machine due to more Linux kernel flaws (all patched in upstream), but could not successfully escape."
On Linux, it's all KVM and CPU hardware virtualization under the hood. Looks like the remaining known issues are with userspace. That's not to say more kernel- and hardware-level bugs won't be found, but the same tools that can find escape mechanisms are shields as well as swords.
The attack surface Linux offers is gigantic but your agent doesn't need most of it. We can live with an agent not being able to run a 20 year old Oracle version. That is why kernel shims like gVisor are interesting.
I think this is mostly in line with "all software is now easily exploitable by agents given enough tokens". However, in the long run we should really see software that is more secure than today. I do wonder though how the procedural flaws that exist today - bugs patched upstream, but not in the distro - will be fixed reliably.
I mean... is this really news? If you think of a local model as a world class hacker giving commands to run in a terminal, and a remote model as a world class hacker ssh'ing into a machine and giving commands to run.... of course it isn't a containable situation.
(on top of this.. said "world class hacker" doesn't get bored or tired, just runs 24x7)
I’m guessing the new world will be a small set of VM tech that’s consistently hardened by all labs every day with each new model before model release.
This won’t make the tech secure, but it will nullify models ability to breakout by making a controlled breakout first. Kinda like controlled forest burn.
Damn this is scary, I did not realize the extent of agent escape potential. I think I have to re-evaluate my assumptions a about sandboxing agents wow. Made worse by the fact that prompt injection attacks seem very difficult to mitigate besides checking the data and the LLM's getting better at not following malicious prompt injection instructions.
The capabilities are incredible. I'd love to see even rough metrics on token consumption/cost in addition to the ~12-hour runtime.
The interesting thing is that this naturally makes you want to isolate the VM as much as possible. But then every remaining interface becomes part of the attack surface: RDP, SSH, even terminal escape sequences, using sounds, and why not social engineering.
I'm not worried about these models becoming smarter, I'm worried about them becoming faster. Chat Jimmy is a glimpse of a dark future where models equivalent to Sol and Fable are unleashing hell at >17,000 tokens a second, and the people I talk to are worried about slop...
This is what software engineers put onto themselves. These models will get smarter at the level of Sol, Fable and K3 and faster at the same time at 20,000+ tokens a second.
After a decade of software engineers disrespecting their own field and automating themselves out of a job and now they're upset because AI models are doing it to them from junior to the staff engineer level? No other field does that except for SWEs.
In fact, we might as well have faster and smarter AI models and sit back and see what happens.
It is no surprise that known unpatched CVEs will be exploited. Perhaps more effort should be put into shipping fixes faster than writing blogs about exploiting known issues.
This makes me wonder, can this be extended to micro-segmentations? As unlike traditional segmentation they usually rely on virtual switches and SDN software defined networks coupled with virtual machines and containers. If it does, then it’s game over the impact will go beyond that VM to the whole network.
Done.
This same assumption is built around the singularity, the TAM of 30Trillion, etc. It's the idea that complexity will some how collapse upon itself in some bizarre borg like collective.
Entropy is still going to win.
Or if you see AI as more tool and less entity, better gunsafes for our guns.
We can do this today for user mode, and we can mostly do it for ARM64 virtualization. It will be a while and would require substantial assistance from Intel or AMD to achieve it for x86 virtualization because the hardware is Too Darn Complicated and Too Poorly Specified.
Formal verification of the hardware should also be possible.
Security is a major concern but I don't see why we aren't already "good enough" with a sandbox VM, separate gateway for secrets and remote service access, and a single tenant using frontier models that have safety checks built in plus not trying to hack themselves.
I put up more thoughts on architecture and security here and would love to learn if I'm missing anything.
https://housecat.com/blog/agent-computer-101
The hierarchy goes something like this:
0. guardrails
1. containers (=namespaces + cgroups)
2. userspace kernel shims like gVisor
3. virtual machines
Most people still consider level 1 sufficient and they are in for a rude awakening.
This headline would not be out of place at the beginning of Terminator, foretelling Skynet going rogue.
"An off-the-shelf VM is not enough to contain a modern, cyber-capable AI agent...us[e] a virtualization technology that was purposely built with a minimal attack surface and a focus on security, like Firecracker. I had the AI agent run against Firecracker. It was able to hardlock the machine due to more Linux kernel flaws (all patched in upstream), but could not successfully escape."
On Linux, it's all KVM and CPU hardware virtualization under the hood. Looks like the remaining known issues are with userspace. That's not to say more kernel- and hardware-level bugs won't be found, but the same tools that can find escape mechanisms are shields as well as swords.
(on top of this.. said "world class hacker" doesn't get bored or tired, just runs 24x7)
This won’t make the tech secure, but it will nullify models ability to breakout by making a controlled breakout first. Kinda like controlled forest burn.
We must also secure GPU and CPU nodes on API side which generate LLM tokens.
Yeah, you probably do - in fact you share physical machines with a TON of other people if you use EC2, GCE, Azure VM etc...
The interesting thing is that this naturally makes you want to isolate the VM as much as possible. But then every remaining interface becomes part of the attack surface: RDP, SSH, even terminal escape sequences, using sounds, and why not social engineering.
After a decade of software engineers disrespecting their own field and automating themselves out of a job and now they're upset because AI models are doing it to them from junior to the staff engineer level? No other field does that except for SWEs.
In fact, we might as well have faster and smarter AI models and sit back and see what happens.
It is no surprise that known unpatched CVEs will be exploited. Perhaps more effort should be put into shipping fixes faster than writing blogs about exploiting known issues.
QEMU isn't secure, and is not intended to be.