Compromised LiteLLM 1.107.0 on PyPI Installs a Credential Stealer and Backdoor
100 points by abhisek 3 hours ago | 45 comments

hmokiguess 13 minutes ago
https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm/issues/47826#issuecomment...

> OSS Users > For the time being, please pin your version to 1.106.2 or any explicit version published prior to now.

> Enterprise Customers > There currently exists a private LiteLLM registry for enterprise customers, in which we are distributing an embargoed release that remediates a vulnerability whose disclosure date is scheduled for October 27. Our private registry is not affected. If you are an enterprise customer pulling from our private registry you are not affected.

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1-6 4 minutes ago
This is the 2nd time. I'm glad I moved away from this platform.
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baddash 36 minutes ago
litellm in the news again
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TZubiri 31 minutes ago
What's interesting here is that this will only affect those who did not migrate off LiteLLM after it was attacked the first time.

I'm not saying everyong should migrate after there's a vuln, but I'm definitely saying that. Unless it's something huge and foundational like a programming language (PHP gets a second chance), just migrate within the next couple of weeks.

I didn't even have it installed the first time, so the ideal programmers, (read, your competition), actually suffered 0 vulns from this dep, if you suffered 1, that's already pretty bad, being burnt twice should be a wake up call. If you get hit 3 times by the same dependency, it's a lost case.

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wongarsu 22 minutes ago
As someone who does not use litellm but instead a barely maintained underpowered alternative: what did everyone migrate to?

If it matters, I am mostly interested in the aspect of having a proxy that unifies multiple ollama and openai-compatible endpoints with model-based routing and failover. Optionally with api-keys, reporting, budgets, etc. I do not particularly care about the MCP gateway, Agent-To-Agent thingy, and whatever else LiteLLM bolted on over time

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tkz1312 20 minutes ago
Claude will write you something custom that fits your exact requirements with zero supply chain risk in an afternoon.
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spike021 6 minutes ago
how is there zero supply risk? claude will still package dependencies into a homemade solution at some level...
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tkz1312 3 minutes ago
sure zero was a bit strong, but I personally feel pretty good about depending on only the go stdlib, compared to pulling in litellm.
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john_strinlai 23 minutes ago
>PHP gets a second chance

second? i haven't kept count, but we have to be somewhere in the hundreds of chances now

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stbenjam 2 hours ago
IMHO defaults for uv, npm, etc should all have a cooldown for 24 - 48 hours by default, you should have to go out of your way to install something newer.
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robinhoodexe 56 minutes ago
We have 7d cooldown on packages on an internal pypi proxy but that blocks security updates also, which we now have to manually exclude from the cooldown.

I’m unsure how to automate this properly, maybe an LLM is the best starting point.

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trollbridge 12 minutes ago
Problem is, we leave ourselves open for LLM injection attacks.
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mbrumlow 28 minutes ago
Are security updates immune ?
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tikkabhuna 14 minutes ago
They definitely wouldn't be if attackers knew that it would then bypass cooldowns!

Ultimately, you need someone to verify releases and that probably means paying for it. I know Sonatype paid solutions utilise their own internal research to allow/block new releases.

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dlkasajiewo 17 minutes ago
No, but there's a bigger tradeoff for not upgrading. In one case it's that you're potentially exposed to a known vulnerability, vs the other case where you might just be missing out on some new or slightly reworked feature.
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fmbb 25 minutes ago
It’s in the name. They are secure!
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mattstir 16 minutes ago
But then an attacker marks their malicious release as a critical security update. It's really messy unfortunately.
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giancarlostoro 46 minutes ago
I wonder if in some cases it's not so much that people are updating too quickly, but rather, their deployment pipelines do not have pinned / frozen versions attached to their builds.
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rcleveng 2 hours ago
I didn't realize they've all such added that, this was a change we made to our own projects last year when these first started - glad to see it's common.

Risk is ensuring enough security researchers are finding these and quarantining these before that default cooldown lapses.

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stbenjam 56 minutes ago
Yea, I think all the tools have this now but its not a default. Install scripts should also be turned off by default and require some hassle to turn them on for the first time in a package.
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tech_solver 47 minutes ago
its litellm again. I wonder about maintainer trustworthiness
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rcleveng 2 hours ago
Seriously again for litellm? I really with that things like Google ADK didn't add this to my deps.
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cyanydeez 33 minutes ago
all popular, free, ungated software will be poisoned; like kesler syndrome but for the world of open source software.
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syntaxing 34 minutes ago
I figured LLMs nowadays would be good enough to catch issues like this. Is it because it’s too costly to do it?
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abhisek 30 minutes ago
Yes if you use LLM to analyse everything. Not really if you analyse diffs, with heuristics to select candidates for LLM/agent based analysis. But at the cost of missing out novel attacks.
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infecto 47 minutes ago
Any package hosts that scan and include cooldowns by default that operate on a consumption model? The ones I have seen all charge a lot.
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abhisek 29 minutes ago
Not sure about a service, but PMG enforces dependency cooldown and sandbox on package install. https://github.com/safedep/pmg
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TZubiri 28 minutes ago
Socket.dev

Tell em Tom Zubiri sent ya (I don't get a commission, just good karma)

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cyanydeez 36 minutes ago
man, people are going to be sorely disappointed in what's free on the internet in a couple of years.

Agents and malware will eradicate all goodwill left.

Good by internet.

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callamdelaney 2 hours ago
Why on earth do these people make it impossible to select the title of their article?
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nkjoep 54 minutes ago
it's just the poor styling of the selection highlight colour.
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hungryhobbit 41 minutes ago
To clarify a little further, you can select the title, you just can't tell that it's selected because the author made a "poor" (REALLY REALLY DUMB) decision to deliberately style away a basic browser feature (text highlighting).
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santiago-pl 2 hours ago
I wish all the best to LiteLLM team with handling it again. I can imagine how challenging are situations like this one.

However, if anyone is looking for 20x faster and less "targeted" LiteLLM alternative - I'm work on one in Go. That's why GoModel it's called. https://github.com/ENTERPILOT/GoModel/

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ghrl 2 hours ago
Sounds like a reasonable choice of a language.

I myself have written a small llm proxy in Go, doing nothing but injecting the real API key to outgoing requests while itself validating virtual keys it generates, and it works great.

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santiago-pl 2 hours ago
Definitely it was a deliberated decision. Also enterprises adapt Go more and more.
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TZubiri 27 minutes ago
If you don't use any LLM router, it's infinity times faster, and infitesimally as targetted.
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0xbadc0de5 2 hours ago
Again! Yikes.
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jiwidi 2 hours ago
Twice? uiuiui
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rvz 2 hours ago
So in just 1 week:

1. Google Cloud Outage [0]

2. eMudhra CA private key Leak [1]

3. PingCap TiDB 10.6 TB data Leak [2]

4. PHP2Shell uncovers critical CVEs (with AI) [3]

...and now we have Round 2 of a LiteLLM compromise after the first one in [4].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50163961

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50166579

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50173716

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50180836

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47501426

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gcr 45 minutes ago
don't forget today's NodeJS security update addressing its own RCE bugs!
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petesergeant 2 hours ago
> There currently exists a private LiteLLM registry for enterprise customers, in which we are distributing an embargoed release that remediates a vulnerability whose disclosure date is scheduled for October 27.

https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm/issues/47826

oh boy. Announcing that there's a private enterprise repo you should be paying for if you don't want a credential stealer in your build is quite the optic, and then announcing there's an undisclosed second vulnerability that's being distributed, just not to the poors...

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sullivanmatt 46 minutes ago
That's not what's being said, at all. They are simply telling their enterprise customers that there is a different build pathway for the enterprise builds and that pathway wasn't impacted by this issue.

Also if you don't like organizations fixing vulns without releasing the open source first, you're going to be upset when you learn how every major vuln and associated patches are distributed long before the fixes hit the repos. A timely example of this is PHP, literally today.

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petesergeant 31 minutes ago
> A timely example of this is PHP, literally today.

Sorry, there was a paid-for PHP release that fixed it I could have gotten a week ago, and that they publicly announced existed, and it was just people who don't pay for PHP who had to wait...?

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sullivanmatt 11 minutes ago
Yeah, that's how many companies with open ecosystems work. If you're using e.g. RedHat, you are getting packages with embargoed fixes baked into them before those fixes hit public repos. Node.js, OpenSSL, Git itself all do this.

You can argue about whether the "publicly announced existed" part since they don't advertise for any single package, but that's the ecosystem you buy into.

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bcvvvy 29 minutes ago
Fuck this week.
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azyc 36 minutes ago
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News2Use 2 hours ago
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deployvet 2 hours ago
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Jeeetendra 2 hours ago
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chelseahermes 3 hours ago
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