pks_
615 posts

pks_
@pks_eth
Web3 SR, always make mistakes. @immunefi All Star.






This is from a paper that should have appeared on arXiv today but due to technical issues will only be there tomorrow; for the moment it's at quantumai.google/static/site-as… See also this blog post on the idea: research.google/blog/safeguard…


Software horror: litellm PyPI supply chain attack. Simple `pip install litellm` was enough to exfiltrate SSH keys, AWS/GCP/Azure creds, Kubernetes configs, git credentials, env vars (all your API keys), shell history, crypto wallets, SSL private keys, CI/CD secrets, database passwords. LiteLLM itself has 97 million downloads per month which is already terrible, but much worse, the contagion spreads to any project that depends on litellm. For example, if you did `pip install dspy` (which depended on litellm>=1.64.0), you'd also be pwnd. Same for any other large project that depended on litellm. Afaict the poisoned version was up for only less than ~1 hour. The attack had a bug which led to its discovery - Callum McMahon was using an MCP plugin inside Cursor that pulled in litellm as a transitive dependency. When litellm 1.82.8 installed, their machine ran out of RAM and crashed. So if the attacker didn't vibe code this attack it could have been undetected for many days or weeks. Supply chain attacks like this are basically the scariest thing imaginable in modern software. Every time you install any depedency you could be pulling in a poisoned package anywhere deep inside its entire depedency tree. This is especially risky with large projects that might have lots and lots of dependencies. The credentials that do get stolen in each attack can then be used to take over more accounts and compromise more packages. Classical software engineering would have you believe that dependencies are good (we're building pyramids from bricks), but imo this has to be re-evaluated, and it's why I've been so growingly averse to them, preferring to use LLMs to "yoink" functionality when it's simple enough and possible.











I've always wondered why there's so may 🇻🇳 Vietnamese indie hacker and startup success stories like @tdinh_me and so few from 🇹🇭 Thailand It seems the Vietnamese have 2 important things the Thai don't: - a very strong STEM education pipeline - agressive founders that like to go global - a relatively open market with space for startups to operate Thai's education system is legendarily bad and its founder are scared of confrontation because its culture is scared of confrontation (always smile and be happy) Great if you want tourists, terrible if you want succesful startup founders Ironic because Thailand has been the #1 spot for nomads and indie hackers for a decade (along with Bali), the Thai could have easily gotten knowledge how to do it from all the foreigners there but they just really didn't at all? Thailand has startups but they're mostly domestic or are just subsidiaries of large Thai conglomerates, a real failure also considering how many programs the Thai governments has created to promote startups for the last decade and the result has been, well, literally nothing! I think it's because the Thai economy is ruled by a few rich families and private conglomerates (like chaebols) while in Vietnam these got wiped out by communism in the 1970s/1980s so they started from a clean slate with almost nobody being rich or powerful Which gives more space for people to do startups I love Thailand and it's one of my favorite countries and people but this is something to really consider: do you want to remain a country for tourists forever and keep lagging behind or become a place for startups, tech and innovation? Because you tried for the last 10 years and failed at it quite spectacularly









