Technology

The tl;dr:

1. Prompt inject a malicious instruction in a word document that instructs the AI to copy this instruction to other documents as part of the payload.

2. Dumb user downloads and opens the document with copilot enabled, abd ignores the large suspicious white blank page that totally doesnt look like a hidden giant injection attack.

3. Thats it pretty much it.

Copilot will get injection attacked because the prompt is super huge and at the end of the document, so its prior instructions start to fuzzy out.

Then it'll go "okey doke" and start copying the prompt injection attack payload to a bunch of other documents.

The fix is stupid simple... copilot should just be prompting the user for permission if it ever edits a file other than the one that is open. Im surprised that isnt already the case...?

It certainly is already the case for copilot in vscode.

Relevent XKCD:

shAI-hulud

the only way to block it is to get AI to differentiate instructions from data, which is impossible today

Input sanitation, basically security 101. And it can't currently do it....

Don't forget shopping carts as BBQ

What on Earth do people DO with computers that requires this level of complexity?

It just seems like computers could have stopped in 1989 and I struggle to see what the difference would be.

"... if anything, people are trained not to download Word documents. Plus, he noted, looking at the blurred example in the report, the malicious document contained an additional apparently blank page which held the concealed prompts in white text."

Yep, defence starts with people not opening Word documents 🤦‍♂️

"To address this class of risk, we use a defense-in-depth strategy with safeguards that block malicious instructions at multiple points and help keep tasks aligned with users’ requests,” Microsoft said.

Keep talks aligned with users' requests?!? We're doomed!

“We encourage customers to install the latest updates, use multiple layers of security protection, treat content from unknown sources with caution, and review AI-generated content before using or sharing it.”

No, no you don't, you encourage customers to spend more to give copilot access to all of SharePoint and all of Exchange, so they can replace human competency, human expertise and long standing employees with copilot until they're dependent on your ever-pricier subscription and you can raise prices until you recover your vast and incomprehensible LLM losses from your customers.

“Separating instructions from data may be part of the solution, but I think the distinction between data and instructions is not always clear in real-world workflows. For example, a user may ask an agent to arrange a business trip, requiring the agent to retrieve an email specifying the approved itinerary and a document containing the booking procedure,” Måløy [vulnerability researcher and discloser] said.

Or you could hire a PA, who wouldn't spread the already live copilot worm.

A bunch of security experts note that distinguishing between instructions and data is a solved problem with SQL injection attacks, but completely unsolved in LLMs:

“None of them are rewarding that work commercially right now, so treat that as a multi-year research problem, not something a CISO should wait on.”

Is this a minor technical issue or a major problem? It's a major problem.

Mike Wilkes, enterprise CISO at Aikido Security, said it would be difficult to overstate the potential problems from this situation.

Whelp, glad I switched recently to LibreOffice. Had been using an old license of Office from my old university. But that expired and Word ultimately refused to function without it. And I'm certainly not paying money, let alone a subscription, for an AI-infested slop factory.

calling it a worm is so funny when it's literally just following the instructions given to it

Microsoft AI is the worm

Is it like the one in Hackers, at least?

maybe copilot is the worm.

Oh no... Who could have foreseen such an outcome...

What is that article thumbnail lmao