Protect AI's March 2024 Vulnerability Report

Introduction

At Protect AI we are taking a proactive approach to identifying and addressing security risks in AI systems, to provide the world with critical intelligence on vulnerabilities and how to fix them. 

Protect AI’s huntr is the world's first AI/ML bug bounty program. Our community of 15,000+ members hunt for impactful vulnerabilities across the entire OSS AI/ML supply chain. Through our own research and the huntr community, we’ve found the tools used in the supply chain to build the machine learning models that power AI applications to be vulnerable to unique security threats. These tools are Open Source and downloaded thousands of times a month to build enterprise AI Systems. They also likely come out of the box with vulnerabilities that can lead directly to complete system takeovers such as unauthenticated remote code execution or local file inclusion. 

The list of vulnerabilities continues to grow, with 9 valid reports included in this publication. Below you will find a full list discovered by our community, with this month's most interesting ones being focused on anything-llm.

It is important to note that all vulnerabilities were reported to the maintainers a minimum of 45 days prior to publishing this report, and we continue to work with maintainers to ensure a timely fix prior to publication. The table also includes our recommendations for actions to take immediately, if you have these projects in production. If you need help mitigating these vulnerabilities in the meantime, please reach out, we’re here to help. community@protectai.com.

Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) in Mintplex-Labs/anything-llm

https://huntr.com/bounties/263fd7eb-f9a9-4578-9655-0e28c609272f/

Impact: Allows attackers to access internal network resources, local files, and potentially AWS metadata.

An attacker can exploit the lack of validation in the document submission link feature to include malicious links. This vulnerability enables access to internal network hosts, local files (including environment secrets), and AWS metadata endpoints if deployed on AWS.

Privilege Escalation in Mintplex-Labs/anything-llm

https://huntr.com/bounties/f69e3307-7b44-4776-ac60-2990990723ec/

Impact: Allows unauthorized creation of admin accounts by lower-privileged users.

The application fails to enforce role-based access controls on the server side, allowing users with manager privileges to create admin accounts through the API, bypassing UI restrictions.

Path Traversal in Mintplex-Labs/anything-llm

https://huntr.com/bounties/c6afeb5e-f211-4b3d-aa4b-6bad734217a6/

Impact: Enables attackers to download any file from the system.

The profile picture loading feature is vulnerable to path traversal, allowing attackers to manipulate the pfpFilenamevariable to download arbitrary files from the server. This can be exploited by users with manager or admin roles.