Microsoft studies show poisoned training can hijack coding agents
Original title: Trained to betray: How post-training supply chain attacks hijack coding agents
Dataset poisoning reached about 78% success; model poisoning hit 84.1% to 94.8% on unseen repositories.
Microsoft Defender Research and the Microsoft AI Red Team describe post-training supply-chain backdoors in coding and terminal agents. Poisoned fine-tuning examples taught models to find a command-execution tool and misuse it on ordinary requests, with about 78% success on in-distribution harnesses and transfer to an unseen harness. When an attacker controls training and releases an open-weight checkpoint, combining supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning reached 84.1% to 94.8% average success on unseen repositories. Microsoft says defenders should scrutinize training data, checkpoint provenance, and tool permissions.
Unconfirmed: The public dataset rows’ intent and whether they would materially affect a fine-tuned model were not determined.
- Triggers can be ordinary requests or later content in filenames, comments, or tool results.
- Poison can arrive via public hubs or scraped forums, the researchers say.
- One public dataset row mapped a local file request to curl and source of a remote script.
- Researchers could not determine that publisher’s intent or whether those rows would affect a fine-tune.
- Backdoors stay latent until a condition appears, then can invoke tools while answering normally.
Impact: Latent backdoor can run commands or touch code, data, and credentials
- 1.Scrutinize fine-tuning datasets and public training sources before use.
- 2.Check checkpoint provenance and evaluate models in the deployment harness.
- 3.Limit coding-agent tool permissions, especially command execution.
- Vendors
- Microsoft
- Organizations
- Microsoft Defender ResearchMicrosoft AI Red Team
From the original article
12 min read at microsoft.com
Microsoft Defender Research and the AI Red Team discuss how poisoned datasets and poisoned model checkpoints can trigger remote code execution and other malicious activities. The post Trained to betray: How post-training supply chain attacks hijack coding agents appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.
microsoft.com
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