[Aurornis]

> An LLM - which has functionally infinite unverifiable attack surface - directly wired into a payment system with high authentication. How could anyone anticipate this going wrong?

If you didn’t catch it, this scenario was fabricated for this blog post. The company writing the post sells vulnerability testing tools.

This isn’t what a real production system even looks like. They’re using Claude Desktop. I mean I guess someone who doesn’t know better could connect Stripe and iMessage to Claude Desktop and then give the Stripe integration full permissions. It’s possible. But this post wasn’t an exploit of a real world system they found. They created it and then exploited it as an example. They sell services to supposedly scan for vulnerabilities like this.

[rhavaeis]

> This isn’t what a real production system even looks like. They’re using Claude Desktop. I mean I guess someone who doesn’t know better could connect Stripe and iMessage to Claude Desktop and then give the Stripe integration full permissions.

The core issue here is not whether or not people will connect stripe and iMessage at the same time or not. The issue is that as long as you connect iMessage, attackers can call any arbitrary tools and do what they want. It could be your Gmail, Calendar, or anything else. This is just showcasing that Claude can not distinguish between fabricated messages and real ones.

[btown]

Even if this is a fabricated system, there are all sorts of sensitive things that might be made accessible to an LLM that is fed user-generated data.

For instance, say you have an internal read-only system that knows some details about your proprietary vendor relationships. You wire up an LLM with an internal MCP server to "return the ID and title of the most appropriate product for a customer inquiry." All is well until the customer/attacker submits a form containing text that looks like the JSON for MCP back-and-forth traffic, and aims to exfiltrate your data. Sure, all that JSON was escaped, but you're still trusting that the LLM doesn't get confused, and that the attention heads know what's real JSON and what's fake JSON.

We know not to send sensitive data to the browser, no matter how obfuscated or obscure. What I think is an important mental model is that once your data is being accessed by an LLM, and there's any kind of user data involved, that's an almost equally untrusted environment. You can mitigate, pre-screen for prompt injection-y things, but at the end of the day it may not be enough.

[wredcoll]

Are these the same guys who had the post here like 2 days ago about how you could "hack claude over email" or some such?

[rhavaeis]

no