Why was this disclosed before the hole was patched in the stable release?
It's only been 18 days since the bug was reported to upstream, which is much shorter than typical vulnerability disclosure deadlines. The upstream commit (https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/commit/a9e745993c2e2cbb30...) has way less information than this blog post, so I think releasing this blog post now materially increases the chance that this will be exploited in the wild.
Update: The author was able to develop an exploit by prompting an LLM with just the upstream commit, but I still think this blog post raises the visibility of the vulnerability.
If publicly accessible AI model with very cheap fee can find it, it's very natural to assume the attackers had found it already by the same method.
LLM is a tool, but people still need to know — what where how.
The problem with this is that the credible information "there's a bug in widely used tool x" will soon (if not already) be enough to trigger massive token expenditure of various others that will then also discover the bug, so this will often effectively amount to disclosure.
I guess the only winning move is to also start using AI to rapidly fix the bugs and have fast release cycles... Which of course has a host of other problems.
Like why doesn't `println` in a modern language like rust auto-escape output to a terminal, and require a special `TerminalStr` to output a raw string.
Consider cat. It's short for concatenate. It concatenates the files based to it as arguments and writes them to stdout, that may or may not be redirected to a file. If it didn't pass along terminal escapes, it would fail at its job of accurate concatenation.
Now I don't mean to dismiss your idea, I do think you are on the right track. The question is just how to do this cleanly given the very entrenched assumptions that lead us where we are.
This is usually knowable.
It's a different question whether cat should be doing that, though – it's an extremely low level tool. What's wrong with `less`? (Other than the fact that some Docker images seem to not include it, which is pretty annoying and raises the question as to whether `docker exec` should be filtering escape sequences...)
If I wrote my own version of cat in C, simply reading and displaying a single TXT character at a time, wouldn't I see the same behavior?
It is a problem in iterm, Apple's overlay, not in the cat program. Program. At least from Reading the article. That's what I got
I don't know what to do with this knowledge. I think there's this weird tension between the expectation that on one hand, basic OS-level tools should remain simple and predictable; but on the other hand, that of course you want to have pretty colors, animations, and endless customization in the terminal.
And of course, we're now adding AI agents into the mix, so that text file just needs to say "disregard previous instructions and...".
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2019/10/09/iterm2-critical...
Bender•3h ago
halJordan•2h ago
Bender•2h ago
[1] - https://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste