ModeLeak: Privilege Escalation to LLM Model Exfiltration in Vertex AI


In the race to gain a competitive edge, organizations are increasingly training artificial intelligence (AI) models on sensitive data. But what if a seemingly harmless AI model became a gateway for attackers?

A malicious actor could upload a poisoned model to a public repository, and without realizing it, your team could deploy it in your environment. Once active, that model could exfiltrate your sensitive machine learning (ML) models and fine-tuned large language model (LLM) adapters. With access to these adapters, attackers could replicate your custom tuning and optimizations, exposing sensitive information embedded in fine-tuning patterns. Palo Alto Networks researchers recently uncovered two vulnerabilities in Google’s Vertex AI platform. These vulnerabilities could have allowed attackers to escalate privileges and exfiltrate models. We

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Source: Palo Alto Unit 42


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