OpenAI patches ChatGPT flaw that smuggled data over DNS

OpenAI talks up data security for its AI services, yet Check Point says that ChatGPT allowed data to leak through a DNS side channel before the flaw was fixed. In February, the free-spending AI biz fixed a data exfiltration vulnerability in ChatGPT that allowed a single prompt to bypass the notional safeguards OpenAI had put in place. "We found that a single malicious prompt could activate a hidden exfiltration channel inside a regular ChatGPT conversation," researchers from Check Point said in a blog post on Monday. It's not supposed to be that easy. OpenAI has implemented various safeguards around ChatGPT to limit data exfiltration by the various tools it can use. For example, the company says, "The ChatGPT code execution environment is unable to generate outbound network requests directly." But Check Point researchers found that wasn't entirely correct. "The vulnerability we discovered allowed information to be transmitted to an external server through a side channel originating from the container used by ChatGPT for code execution and data analysis," the researchers said. "Crucially, because the model operated under the assumption that this environment could not send data outward directly, it did not recognize that behavior as an external data transfer requiring resistance or user mediation." OpenAI's security for ChatGPT appears to be more robust when it comes to defending against bots scraping ChatGPT conversations – the very thing publishers have been trying to do to O...