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Open Source @Github

Murphy – Bridge Ollama Requests to IRC

https://github.com/RickCarlino/murphy-irc-bot
1•rickcarlino•2m ago•0 comments

Hacker News Recap podcast is back

https://open.spotify.com/show/5T24sjkV7tVRNybotteILY
1•youssefarizk•2m ago•1 comments

Ethernal September

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
1•cl3misch•3m ago•0 comments

OpenAI Employee Stock Sale Would Value ChatGPT Maker at $500B

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/technology/openai-chatgpt-stock-sale-valuation.html
1•xnx•3m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Twick - React SDK for Timeline-Based Video Editing

https://github.com/ncounterspecialist/twick
1•seekerquest•5m ago•0 comments

Jepsen 18: Serializable Mom by Kyle Kingsbury

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpTxWePmW5Y
1•todsacerdoti•10m ago•0 comments

The Great SSL Certificate Panic

https://redmonk.com/kholterhoff/2025/08/15/the-great-ssl-certificate-panic/
2•chillax•12m ago•0 comments

D2 (text to diagram tool) now supports ASCII renders

https://d2lang.com/blog/ascii/
1•alixanderwang•12m ago•0 comments

Vaio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaio
1•gjvc•18m ago•0 comments

How Linux and Open Source Became Hollywood's Secret VFX Weapon

https://www.brainnoises.com/blog/hollywood-linux-vfx-secret-weapon/
1•voxadam•19m ago•0 comments

PyPl is blocking expired domains to halt malware attacks

https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/pypl-is-blocking-hundreds-of-expired-domains-to-halt-malware-attacks
2•DocFeind•21m ago•0 comments

Injectable 'skin in a syringe' could heal burns without scars

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/08/250813083610.htm
3•acossta•22m ago•1 comments

Brain-computer interface could decode inner speech in real time

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1093888?user_id=66c4bf745d78644b3aa57b08
1•gmays•22m ago•0 comments

Are Marathons and Extreme Running Linked to Colon Cancer?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/health/running-colon-cancer.html
2•littlexsparkee•22m ago•0 comments

Firefox: AI-enhanced tab groups

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-ai-enhanced-tab-groups
2•nateb2022•22m ago•1 comments

Sam Altman Shows Me GPT 5 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmtuvNfytjM
1•RyanShook•23m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI-powered CLI that translates natural language to FFmpeg

2•thedkpatel•24m ago•0 comments

Rick Beato talking Universal Music Group copyright claims [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBq_krhKbW4
2•derbOac•25m ago•1 comments

A Freelancer's Guide to Effortless AI-Powered Time Management

https://flowping.app/posts/Time-Management
1•cccwwef•28m ago•1 comments

There's a Hollow Knight: Silksong Livestream on August 21 at 10:30AM ET

https://www.engadget.com/gaming/theres-a-hollow-knight-silksong-livestream-on-august-21-at-1030am-et-153220026.html
1•3Samourai•32m ago•1 comments

RAG-Shot Learning

https://joecooper.me/blog/ragshot/
1•thatjoeoverthr•32m ago•0 comments

Catching AI Hallucination in SQL: The Chess Example

https://www.timeplus.com/post/ai-chess-hallucination-detection
2•tingfirst•33m ago•0 comments

Hollow Knight: Silksong – Special Announcement [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XGeJwsUP9c
1•HelloUsername•33m ago•0 comments

How Sleep Cleans the Brain and Keeps You Healthy

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-sleep-cleans-the-brain-and-keeps-you-healthy/
4•beardyw•34m ago•1 comments

What is 'AI psychosis' and how can ChatGPT affect your mental health?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/08/19/ai-psychosis-chatgpt-explained-mental-health/
2•dccooper•35m ago•0 comments

By opening this can of protein powder, you agree to our TOC / arbitration clause

https://bsky.app/profile/reckless.bsky.social/post/3lwrgayyykc2k
5•zzzeek•36m ago•0 comments

What's the point of vibe coding if I still have to pay a dev to fix it?

https://old.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1mu6t8z/whats_the_point_of_vibe_coding_if_i_still_have_to/
2•latexr•37m ago•4 comments

If Nix Then Nix

https://www.whimsicalcode.com/writing/if-nix-then-nix
1•chilipepperhott•40m ago•0 comments

Trump wants NASA to burn a crucial satellite, killing climate change research

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-19/trump-wants-nasa-to-burn-a-crucial-satellite-to-cinders-killing-research-into-climate-change
3•litoE•42m ago•1 comments

The Rainforests Being Cleared to Build Your R.V

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/world/asia/indonesia-borneo-deforestation-rv.html
2•littlexsparkee•44m ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

How we exploited CodeRabbit: From simple PR to RCE and write access on 1M repos

https://research.kudelskisecurity.com/2025/08/19/how-we-exploited-coderabbit-from-a-simple-pr-to-rce-and-write-access-on-1m-repositories/
141•spiridow•2h ago

Comments

ketzo•1h ago
> While running the exploit, CodeRabbit would still review our pull request and post a comment on the GitHub PR saying that it detected a critical security risk, yet the application would happily execute our code because it wouldn’t understand that this was actually running on their production system.

What a bizarre world we're living in, where computers can talk about how they're being hacked while it's happening.

Also, this is pretty worrisome:

> Being quick to respond and remediate, as the CodeRabbit team was, is a critical part of addressing vulnerabilities in modern, fast-moving environments. Other vendors we contacted never responded at all, and their products are still vulnerable. [emphasis mine]

Props to the CodeRabbit team, and, uh, watch yourself out there otherwise!

progforlyfe•1h ago
Beautiful that CodeRabbit reviewed an exploit on its own system!
brainless•1h ago
I did not understand something: why did CodeRabbit run external tools on external code within its own set of environment variables? Why are these variables needed for this entire tooling?
elpakal•1h ago
presuming they take the output of running these linters and pass it for interpretation to Claude or OpenAI
The_Fox•1h ago
Their own tools would need the various API keys, of course, and they did build a method to filter out those variables and managed most user code through it, but it sounds like they forgot to put Rubocop through the special method.

So this researcher may have gotten lucky in choosing to dig into the tool that CodeRabbit got unlucky in forgetting.

chuckadams•1h ago
It sounds like a pretty bad approach in general to have to "filter out the bad stuff" on a case-by-case basis. It should be as simple as launching everything from a sanitized parent environment, and making it impossible to launch any tool otherwise. Or better, make that sanitized environment the default and make privileged operations be the thing that jumps through hoops to talk to a bastion/enclave/whatever that holds the actual keys.
The_Fox•43m ago
Yes although somewhere there will be an `if` statement to determine if the process being started should get the complete environment or a key to get the other keys or whatever. Best to make that `if` at the highest level of the architecture as possible and wrapped in something that makes it obvious, like a `DangerousUserCodeProcess` class.

The only other safety I can think of is a whitelist, perhaps of file pathnames. This helps to maintain a safe-by-default posture. Taking it further, the whitelist could be specified in config and require change approval from a second team.

gdbsjjdn•1h ago
It sounds like they were putting these processes in a chroot jail or something and not allowing them to access the parent process env vars. There's a continuum of ways to isolate child processes in Linux that don't necessarily involve containers or docker.
tadfisher•38m ago
> Why are these variables needed for this entire tooling?

They are not. The Github API secret key should never be exposed in the environment, period; you're supposed to keep the key in an HSM and only use it to sign the per-repo access token. Per the GH docs [0]:

> The private key is the single most valuable secret for a GitHub App. Consider storing the key in a key vault, such as Azure Key Vault, and making it sign-only. This helps ensure that you can't lose the private key. Once the private key is uploaded to the key vault, it can never be read from there. It can only be used to sign things, and access to the private key is determined by your infrastructure rules.

> Alternatively, you can store the key as an environment variable. This is not as strong as storing the key in a key vault. If an attacker gains access to the environment, they can read the private key and gain persistent authentication as the GitHub App.

[0]: https://docs.github.com/en/apps/creating-github-apps/authent...

elpakal•1h ago
> After responsibly disclosing this critical vulnerability to the CodeRabbit team, we learned from them that they had an isolation mechanism in place, but Rubocop somehow was not running inside it.

Curious what this (isolation mechanism) means if anyone knows.

diggan•1h ago
> Curious what this (isolation mechanism) means if anyone knows.

If they're anything like the typical web-startup "developing fast but failing faster", they probably are using docker containers for "security isolation".

kachapopopow•1h ago
you could say that they have vibe forgotten to sandbox it.

(likely asked AI to implement x and ai completely disregarded the need to sandbox).

benmmurphy•16m ago
What a lucky coincidence that the tool the researcher attacked because it allowed code execution was not sandboxed.
kachapopopow•1h ago
Unrelated to the article, but the first time I saw them was in a twitter ad with a completely comically bull** suggestion. I cannot take a company seriously that had something like that inside an ad that is supposed to show the best they're capable of.
hahn-kev•1h ago
Why does CodeRabbit need write access to the git repo? Why doesn't Github let me limit it's access?
dpcx•56m ago
Because it has the ability to write tests for the PR in question.
tadfisher•43m ago
Then it should open a PR for those tests so it can go through the normal CI and review process.
dpcx•38m ago
It updates the existing PR with the tests, I believe. They'd still get reviewed and go through CI.
tadfisher•36m ago
Right, the downside being that the app needs write access to your repository.
rahkiin•2m ago
Writing to PR branches should really be some new kind of permission.
tedivm•13m ago
Doing that requires write access if you're a Github Application. You can't just fork repositories back into another org, since Github Applications only have the permissions of the single organization that they work with. Rulesets that prevent direct pushes to specific branches can help here, but have to be configured for each organization.
binarydreams•41m ago
I've noticed CodeRabbit at times does reviews that are super. It is able to catch bugs that even claude code misses on our Github PRs. Blows my mind at times tbh.

Based on the env vars seems like they're using anthropic, openai, etc. only?

tnolet•31m ago
Interesting. We removed it as it was mostly too verbose, catching too many false positives and never really added anything useful.
curuinor•37m ago
hey, this is Howon from CodeRabbit here. we wish to note that this RCE was reported and fixed in January. it was entirely prospective and no customer data was affected. we have extensive sandboxing for basically any execution of anything now, including any and every tool and all generated code of any kind under the CodeRabbit umbrella.

if you want to learn how CodeRabbit does the isolation, here's a blog post about how: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/h...

thyrfa•34m ago
How can you guarantee that nobody ripped the private key before the researcher told you about the issue though?
KingOfCoders•33m ago
Or has a backdoor installed somewhere?
KingOfCoders•34m ago
The chuzpe to use this as PR.
tadfisher•31m ago
But do you still store your GH API private key in environment variables?
cleverwebb•23m ago
how do you know that no customer data was affected? did you work with github and scan all uses of your keys? how do you know if a use of your github key was authentic or not? did you check with anthroipic/openai/etc to scan logs usage?

It's really hard to trust a "hey we got this guys" statement after a fuckup this big

yunohn•12m ago
While I fully understand that things sometimes get missed, it just seems really bizarre to me that somehow “sandboxing/isolation” was never considered prior to this incident. To me, it feels like the first thing to implement in a system that is explicitly built to run third party untrusted code?
mpeg•9m ago
Where can we find the blog post you made back in January about the RCE fix explaining what measures you took to check if any customer data had been affected?
elpakal•1m ago
> Sandboxing: All Cloud Run instances are sandboxed with two layers of sandboxing and can be configured to have minimal IAM permissions via dedicated service identity. In addition, CodeRabbit is leveraging Cloud Run's second generation execution environment, a microVM providing full Linux cgroup functionality. Within each Cloud Run instance, CodeRabbit uses Jailkit to create isolated processes and cgroups to further restrict the privileges of the jailed process.

In case you don't want to read through the PR

thyrfa•36m ago
It is incredibly bad practice that their "become the github app as you desire" keys to the kingdom private key was just sitting in the environment variables. Anybody can get hacked, but that's just basic secrets management, that doesn't have to be there. Github LITERALLY SAYS on their doc that storing it in an environment variable is a bad idea. Just day 1 stuff. https://docs.github.com/en/apps/creating-github-apps/authent...
thewisenerd•35m ago
global scoped installations or keys always scare me for this reason

i believe the answer here was to exchange the token for something scoped to the specific repo coderabbit is running in, but alas, that doesn't remove the "RCE" _on_ the repo

tadfisher•28m ago
They do that, this is how GH apps work. There is no reason to expose the app's private key in the environment for the code that actually runs on the PR.
edm0nd•30m ago
No bounty was paid for this?
mpeg•12m ago
First thing I looked for... this is an absolutely critical vulnerability that if exploited would have completely ruined their business. No bounty!?
vntok•3m ago
[delayed]
sciencejerk•30m ago
I think that Security fuckups of this disastrous scale should get classified as "breaches" or "incidents" and be required to be publicly disclosed by the news media, in order to protect consumers.

Here is a tool with 1 million customers which was breached with an exploit a clever 11 year old could created.

When the exploit is so simple, I find it likely that bots or Black Hats or APTs had already found a way in and established persistence before the White Hat researchers reported the issue. If this is the case, patching the issue might prevent NEW bad actors from penetrating CodeRabbit's environment, but it might not evict any bad actors which might now be lurking in their environment.

I know Security is hard, but come on guys

cleverwebb•28m ago
I had a visceral and (quite audible) reaction when I got to the environment variable listing.
nphardon•14m ago
Oh, it really makes my day when we get hacker post here on the top. This is so well written too, no mystique, just a simple sequence of logical steps, with pictures.
chanon•9m ago
Oh my god. I haven't finished reading that yet, it became too much to comprehend. Too stressful to take in the scope. The part where he could have put malware into release files of 10s of thousands of open source tools/libraries/software. That could have been a worldwide catastrophe. And who knows what other similar vulnerabilities might still exist elsewhere.
sitzkrieg•1m ago
comically bad. get used to more of this