Yadnesh Salvi

Story · Sarah Sanders (PostHog)

We let an AI agent execute Bash and lived to talk about it (Sarah Sanders (PostHog))

talk · Story page

A page of thin text lines in the upper left, with a thread running out of one line, through a rubber stamp and a narrow funnel, then fanning out into rows of many identical small laptops below.

PostHog's Wizard is an agentic CLI that instruments a codebase for roughly 8,000 people a week, and Sanders audited it as the team considered making it the default install path. Bash was denied by default and secrets went through a vault; the gaps found were two innocent things shaking hands.

In plain words

  • Sarah Sanders examined how changes to ordinary text files could trick PostHog's automated software setup tool.
  • Someone could hide harmful instructions in a text file that an automated reviewer mistakenly approves.
  • The setup tool later reads that file and can carry out instructions on developers' computers.
  • Developers could face attacks through approved files even when the tool already limits what it is allowed to do.

Appeared in

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