XAI Dev Leaks API Key for Private SpaceX, Tesla LLMs

Summary

An employee at Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI leaked a private key on GitHub that for the past two months could have allowed anyone to query private xAI large language models (LLMs) which appear to have been custom made for working with internal data from Musk’s companies, including SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter/X, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Image: Shutterstock, @sdx15. Philippe Caturegli, “chief hacking officer” at the security consultancy Seralys, was the first to publicize the leak of credentials for an x.ai application programming interface (API) exposed in the GitHub code repository of a technical staff member at xAI. Caturegli’s post on LinkedIn caught the attention of researchers at GitGuardian, a company that specializes in detecting and remediating exposed secrets in public and proprietary environments. GitGuardian’s systems constantly scan GitHub and other code repositories for exposed API keys, and fire off automated alerts to affected users. GitGuardian’s Eric Fourrier told KrebsOnSecurity the exposed API key had access to several unreleased models of Grok, the AI chatbot developed by xAI. In total, GitGuardian found the key had access to at least 60 fine-tuned and private LLMs. “The credentials can be used to access the X.ai API with the identity of the user,” GitGuardian wrote in an email explaining their findings to xAI. “The associated account not only has access to public Grok models (grok-2-1212, etc) but also to what appears to be unreleased (grok-2.5V), development (research-grok-2p5v-1018), and private models (tweet-rejector, grok-spacex-2024-11-04).” Fourrier found GitGuardian had alerted the xAI employee about the exposed API key nearly two months ago — on March 2. But as of April 30, when GitGuardian directly alerted xAI’s security team to the exposure, the key was still valid and usable. xAI told GitGuardian to report the matter through its bug bounty program at HackerOne, but just a few hours later the repository containing t...