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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one a little concerned that no obvious attack has been found from this?

It seems doubtful that a state actor is trying to use terminal escape sequences to hide an error message... The state actor wants code execution, not the ability to backspace some warning on a developers terminal. Besides, using such a vulnerability seems far too dangerous - those escape sequences would be plainly obvious in any log file or any inspection of files on-disk.

And at the same time, if you are an undercover state actor, there is no point in potentially revealing yourself by inserting some security problem that isn't exploitable.

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The goal here is to submit what appears to be a sequence of innocuous changes, none of which on their own are “obvious” vulnerabilities. The truth is, we don’t know what the strategic depths of this actor are. It may be years before we know whether an attack is successful.

For example — and this is just hypothetical - the author may have found that some consumer of this codebase uses it in a script, and consumes console output in some form. By modifying its output to behave differently, they may be able to influence the consumer’s execution in some clever way so as to create other conditions necessary for additional exploitation.

Or - the PR could have just been a test to gauge the scrutiny of the approvers.

The "funny" thing here is that this is (somewhat, perhaps?) how an AI intelligent beyond human capacity might execute an attack - or what an attack by one such might feel like: Lots of apparently unrelated actions, many or all of which make no sense ...

... (until and if you see the larger picture, which might be insurmountably difficult ...

... this, coupled with AI-level scalability of social engineering, at AI-level scale -and- with an AI-level understanding of "known-outcomes" that might be desirable towards given goals: "Leader change", etc.-)

There had been code execution exploits tied to escape sequences, for example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40428032 - Abusing url handling in iTerm2 and Hyper for code execution (2024-05-21)

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