Cybersecurity researchers are warning that threat actors are actively exploiting a “disputed” and unpatched vulnerability in an open-source artificial intelligence (AI) platform called Anyscale Ray to hijack computing power for illicit cryptocurrency mining.
“This vulnerability allows attackers to take over the companies’ computing power and leak sensitive data,” Oligo Security researchers Avi Lumelsky, Guy Kaplan, and Gal Elbaz said in a Tuesday disclosure.
The campaign, ongoing since September 2023, has been codenamed ShadowRay by the Israeli application security firm. It also marks the first time AI workloads have been targeted in the wild through shortcomings underpinning the AI infrastructure.
Ray is an open-source, fully-managed compute framework that allows organizations to build, train, and scale AI and Python workloads. It consists of a core distributed runtime and a set of AI libraries for simplifying the ML platform.
The security vulnerability in question is CVE-2023-48022 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical missing authentication bug that allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via the job submission API. It was reported by Bishop Fox alongside two other flaws in August 2023.
The cybersecurity company said the lack of authentication controls in two Ray components, Dashboard, and Client, could be exploited by “unauthorized actors to freely submit jobs, delete existing jobs, retrieve sensitive information, and achieve remote command execution.”
It also cautions in its documentation that it’s the platform provider’s responsibility to ensure that Ray runs in “sufficiently controlled network environments” and that developers can access Ray Dashboard in a secure fashion.
This includes production database passwords, private SSH keys, access tokens related to OpenAI, HuggingFace, Slack, and Stripe, the ability to poison models, and elevated access to cloud environments from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
The unknown attackers behind ShadowRay have also utilized an open-source tool named Interactsh to fly under the radar.
Source: https://thehackernews.com/
