Category Archives: AI and ML

CVE-2023-0405: Like a newborn. AI in some fields may have design weakness. (14th Feb 2023)

Preface: Today is Valentine’s Day 2023, are you alone? But in the future artificial intelligence will be with you.


Background: With an AI content writer, all you need to do is enter your desired topic or keyword into the plugin settings, and then AI will immediately generate an article that reads as if it were written by a human. You’ll get unique, engaging stories without having to spend hours typing out paragraphs or researching facts. Plus, you’ll have a consistent style and tone that you can use for all of your content.


Vulnerability details: The GPT AI Power: Content Writer & ChatGPT & Image Generator & WooCommerce Product Writer & AI Training WordPress plugin before 1.4.38 does not perform any kind of nonce or privilege checks before letting logged-in users modify arbitrary posts.
Ref: CWE is classifying the issue as CWE-862. The software does not perform an authorization check when an actor attempts to access a resource or perform an action. This is going to have an impact on integrity, and availability.


Solution: Upgrading to version 1.4.38 eliminates this vulnerability.


Official Announcement: For details, see the link – https://wpscan.com/vulnerability/3ca9ac21-2bce-4480-9079-b4045b261273

Before you enjoy it with your AI girlfriend, I wish you have a great Valentine’s Day today.

CVE-2023-23625 Certain versions of Go-unixfs from Ipfs contain vulnerability (9th Feb 2023)

Preface: AI system infrastructure may not have a mature model, it will continue forever, without end. Perhaps this is true sustainability. Since the key component is the computer. So the only thing that slows him down is software or hardware bugs.


Background: Cryptocurrency technology fully utilise the concept of Blockchain. Seems the advantage of cryptocurrency is easy misused and lead it become dangerous. Therefore many government hesitate to get involves and let it fail to original objective. However their related technology will be growth rapidly. Yes, it is the IFPS. AI requires heavy amounts of storage and compute. From technical point of view, Distributing storage will be an advantage. Since the data not place in the same area. It enhance overall reliability and efficiency. AI robots will communicate using 5G. Deal with distributed data storage. Machine learning operations and processes can be fully leveraged as it breaks down regional constraints.Perhaps the distributed cloud computing platform is the beginning of milestone to boots the world into artificial intelligence world.

Large models of deep learning are often shared by researchers via Google Drive links which have transfer limits and are not reliably online. IPFS provides a great decentralized solution to hosting data which can be downloaded via regular web links.
IPFS implementation in Go. “unixfs” is a tool in the Go Modules Packages category of a tech stack.
A Merkle DAG is a DAG where each node has an identifier, and this is the result of hashing the node’s contents. go-unixfs implements unix-like filesystem utilities on top of an ipld merkledag. MerkelDAG implementation in Python.

Vulnerability details: go-unixfs is an implementation of a unix-like filesystem on top of an ipld merkledag. Trying to read malformed HAMT sharded directories can cause panics and virtual memory leaks. If you are reading untrusted user input, an attacker can then trigger a panic. This is caused by bogus `fanout` parameter in the HAMT directory nodes.

Solution: Users are advised to upgrade to version 0.4.3 to resolve this issue. Users unable to upgrade should not feed untrusted user data to the decoding functions.

Official announcement: For details, see the link – https://github.com/ipfs/go-unixfs/security/advisories/GHSA-q264-w97q-q778

Who empower knowledge to AI (artificial intelligence). Perhaps the answer is you. (7th Feb 2023)

Preface: Einstein’s formula e=mc2 opened the door to the world of science and the universe. Since the equation involves complex and advanced arithmetic. So no one can simply describe it.
Modern civilisation relies on digital computing. Our daily lives involve smartphones, smart cities and countless so-called Internet of Things (IoT) devices. But who empower knowledge to AI (artificial intelligence). Perhaps the answer is you.

Background: Sometimes when you shop online, you don’t buy. But later, you get an email with a special price on the same product you viewed. Who do the magic? The magic is given by internet cookies.
A cookie is arbitrary data, usually selected and first sent by a web server, and stored on the client computer by the web browser. The browser then sends them back to the server with each request, introducing state (memory of previous events) into an otherwise stateless HTTP transaction.

Following are the type of cookies set by Google on a user’s hard disk.

  • Preference cookie (called PREF) – used to store users preference (like preferred language or any type of customisation).
  • Security cookies (SID and HSID) – used to protect users data from unauthorized access.
  • Process cookies (“Ibcs”) – used to maintain certain websites functionality
  • Advertising cookie (id) – used to serve personalized ads to users and to make advertising more effective
  • Conversion cookies – used to track users interaction with ads.
  • Analytics cookies (“_utma, _utmb, _ga, etc.) – used to collect Google Analytics data

Brief overview: Cookies is a data, whereby it is resources of data analytics.
Ref: The global total has grown by 1.8 percent over the past year, with 95 million new mobile users since this time last year. Global internet users: Global internet users have climbed to 4.95 billion at the start of 2022, with internet penetration now standing at 62.5 percent of the world’s total population.
Big data refers to data that is so large, fast or complex that it’s difficult or impossible to process using traditional methods.
Big data and AI have a synergistic relationship. Big data analytics leverages AI for better data analysis. In turn, AI requires a massive scale of data to learn and improve decision-making processes.

Because of AI and big data, it explain that even though you shop online, but you didn’t buy. But later, you get an email with a special price on the same product you viewed. It’s a simple concept where intelligence comes from.

If given the opportunity, is there room for other discussions in the future, focusing on cybersecurity for artificial intelligence. stay tuned!

Potential threat of ChatGPT (Artificial intelligence) – 19th JAN 2023

Preface: OpenAI was founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba and John Schulman in Nov 2015. ChatGPT is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models, and is fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.

Background: OpenAI GPT-3 is a machine learning model that can be used to generate predictive text via an API.

In GPT-3’s API, a ‘prompt’ is a parameter that is provided to the API so that it is able to identify the context of the problem to be solved. Depending on how the prompt is written, the returned text will attempt to match the pattern accordingly.

Security Focus: ChatGPT is being abused to build hacking tools, why? Programmed with the help of AI, even script kiddies might be lucky enough to craft malware. Experts say it’s a sinister allusion. What are the design flaws in AI itself under normal circumstances? Yes, there is a known issue with so-called prompt injection attacks. Prompt Injection is a new vulnerability that is affecting some AI/ML models and, in particular, certain types of language models using prompt-based learning. 

Additional details: ChatGPT can also code malicious software that can monitor users’ keyboard strokes and create ransomware. For your information, ChatGPT has been developed by OpenAI as an interface for its LLM (Large Language Model).

Moreover, scammers can also use ChatGPT to build bots and sites to trick users into sharing their information and launch highly targeted social engineering scams and phishing campaigns.

For details about Prompt injection attacks against GPT-3, please refer to this link – https://simonwillison.net/2022/Sep/12/prompt-injection/