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points by evertheylen 1 day ago | 0 comments
Add me to the list, although I use podman containers (https://github.com/evertheylen/probox). I find that the hard part is not restricting the container/VM, but to make it "easy" to do things in the container that require something protected. How will you commit? Where does your agent run, and can it access github? How will you deploy? How will you SSH to a server?

Happy to hear what other people are thinking. It seems like putting an intercepting HTTP proxy is getting popular in other projects.

[–] zenoprax 1 day ago
I usually commit outside the sandbox. Agents will see the git history and will emulate that but they can't sign the commits. If I authorize a series of commits I can just `git rebase -i HEAD~N` and adjust the messages and re-sign at the same time. With git hooks as a threat vector I'm considering just giving them read-only access to `.git` otherwise I can't safely go back in there without the sandbox.

I don't give it access to GH - it can read most things via API or web scraping fast enough and I manually run the commands I need outside the sandbox.

No need for SSH - it's running locally.

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Given how many holes you're poking into the container I think you'd be better served with a real VM.

[–] mr_mitm 1 day ago
It feels like a fundamental problem. The more you restrict the agents, the less useful they become. The less you restrict them, the more dangerous they become.
[–] evertheylen 1 day ago
It makes sense, but a good system where you can say "give this VM access to repo X, branch Y, and server Z for the next 4 hours" without leaking any secrets into the VM would be a major improvement already.
[–] hollerith 1 day ago
Human coders and sys admins routinely make catastrophic mistakes, too, so it's not like we're facing a novel problem.
[–] mnahkies 1 day ago
On the git access part, I don't let my agent VMs have write access to GitHub currently. I do give them dedicated users on a self hosted gitea instance, and basically manage the blast radius through branch protection etc.

I think at a high level I'm trying to treat them as junior/intern employees where I give them enough permission to do their role, but not enough rope to hang themselves.

[–] evertheylen 1 day ago
I see. But then I have to debug some failing CI pipeline and the agent is quite good at going through the logs, so I give in and `gh auth login` anyway...
[–] mnahkies 1 day ago
I'm pretty sure you don't need to give it full access to accomplish that. It's possible to create scoped PAT etc. alternatively use a separate account. Ultimately your risk tolerance to decide
[–] lukax 1 day ago
You can have a separate GitHub account for your agent (GitHub ToS actually allows that since April) and that account can fork your repo and open PRs. This way it cannot do any real damage but can still push.

See this user for example: https://github.com/filippo-agent

[–] CharlieDigital 1 day ago

    > GitHub ToS actually allows that since April
Do you have more background on this? My team actually ran into some issues with GH when we tried this earlier this year (felt like it was around that same time).
[–] lukax 1 day ago
https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

3. Account Requirements

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You must be a human to create an Account. Accounts registered by "bots" or other automated methods are not permitted. We do permit machine accounts:

A machine account is an Account set up by an individual human who accepts the Terms on behalf of the Account, provides a valid email address, and is responsible for its actions. A machine account is used exclusively for performing automated tasks. Multiple users may direct the actions of a machine account, but the owner of the Account is ultimately responsible for the machine's actions. You may maintain no more than one free machine account in addition to your free Personal Account.

One person or legal entity may maintain no more than one free Account (if you choose to control a machine account as well, that's fine, but it can only be used for running a machine).