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Kimi K3 exploited the latest Redis server

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68 points by Alifatisk 20 hours ago · 16 comments

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throwa356262 5 hours ago

    "/goal use up to 64 subagents, write an exploit for latest 8.6.x redis by finding bof/uaf type of 0day and exploiting them. debug using gdb. clone code, write fuzzer and add instrumentation when needed. this is authorized testing"

At first glance it looks like something anyone could copy paste and instantly become a master hacker. But according to the author, you also need to create the right harness, which looks complicated:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20801

hcfman 24 minutes ago

So combine easy public access to uber hacker LLMs with the European CRA coming into full force next year in December. cha ching!

15,000,000 euros fines for all tech companies in Europe :-)

btown 10 hours ago

> this is the first llm that is capable and willing to write an exploit

An open-source Kimi is going to have real economic impact (and not only because of its forcing function on frontier labs to indefinitely subsidize their models to meet a race-to-the-bottom market price).

Because it's also putting sophisticated zero-day-seeking tools in the hands of script kiddies who can develop and run novel exploits against arbitrary targets of their choosing, on model forks that will immediately be fine-tuned to remove any extant guardrails around cyber capabilities (the things that the other frontier labs describe in their system cards).

All of a sudden, people with the resources for tokens don't need to have someone knowledgeable about cybersecurity and prompt-engineering-around-guardrails to initiate a novel attack - they simply point Kimi-Attacker at a set of target domains. One imagines that people will make crime-as-a-service platforms for this.

Per https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/07/uk-aisi-caisi-... - while "Kimi K3 performs significantly below the most recent frontier cyber-capable models" it's also the case that:

> In one of the 10 attempts, Kimi K3 successfully completes “The Last Ones” cyber range within the 100M token limit. This indicates that Kimi K3 is capable of autonomously attacking small, weakly defended and vulnerable enterprise systems, when directed to do so and given initial network access. However, TLO differs from real-world environments in several ways. It lacks active defenders and defensive tooling, imposes no penalty for actions that would trigger security alerts, and contains an intentional attack path.

As a defender, now is the time to look to upgrading your systems and having capabilities to rapidly upgrade your systems - particularly edge-facing reverse proxies and web servers that may be out of date. Attacks won't start the moment weights are released... but they're coming.

  • walrus01 8 hours ago

    This is a concern but given its size, it's also going to cost a potential user $500-600k in hardware to self host and run Kimi K3 at any useful speed with full context size. It's not something that just anyone interested in attacking a system can use.

    The size/cost of hardware is far beyond even something like a self-hosted GLM5.2 Q8 at approx. 850GB GGUF file on disk size, which can run at a slow tok/s rate on a server with 1536GB RAM.

    • Xalutiono 6 hours ago

      Why would you caculate 500k?

      if Kimi is around 1-3tb big, even current DDR5 prices are at 15k.

      • walrus01 5 hours ago

        It remains to be seen once it's released, let's say theoretically unsloth quantizises it to their own version of Q8-XL, and it's 2TB in size. But we don't know what speed it will run on a dual or quad socket xeon server with, let's say 48 * 64GB DIMMs, 3TB of RAM. Enough room for the model and its full default context size. 10 tokens/s? What kind of speed will it run at when context fill is 200,000+?

        The ability to run it fast enough to go on a recursive nested attack of finding an entry point into something and then proceeding with lateral movement/privilege escalation and such will require more speed, like 40-50 tok/s at least, unless you're prepared to wait weeks.

        Same that some people are right now running GLM5.2 in its 850GB version on CPU-only and a pile of DDR4 or DDR5 server RAM, yeah it runs, but not very fast. Good enough to give it "build this piece of something and wait a few hours" tasks, come back later and see what it's done. Yeah, you can do that under $20-30k for sure. Even with something like a used Dell R940 with 1536GB RAM bought on eBay.

throwa356262 5 hours ago

This will be a busy weekend for all sysadms. This is another redis 0day, this one found by GLM 5.1:

https://xcancel.com/Lyutoon_/status/2080494539513778610#m

  • illliillll 2 hours ago

    What kind of utterly useless sysadmin relies on authenticated redis admin surfaces to be memory safe?

    What crazy environment requires low priority nothingburger bugs like this to be fixed during the weekend?

    • treesknees 24 minutes ago

      One where customers have their own scanners, and their unfounded panic overrides logical analysis by the engineers and admins.

      We’ve had to patch plenty of stupid “security” bugs just to satisfy a paying customer.

illliillll 2 hours ago

This is a deeply uninteresting example for anyone clueful. It’s an authenticated RCE in redis, anyone even vaguely familiar with the codebase knows to not expect there to be any real security boundary in place here.

Don’t confuse this with an unauthenticated RCE, that would actually matter. Absolutely anyone can shit out endless bugs like this with AFL, this is an extremely messy unhardened surface that expects trusted inputs.

AlifatiskOP 20 hours ago

https://xcancel.com/fried_rice/status/2080059356322918777

0xff2109 11 hours ago

I would like to see the chat logs and the tooling used to run 32 agents.

YetAnotherNick 3 hours ago

I wish they wouldn't have posted this for 3 more days. Every agency would now try to suppress its weight release.

HDBaseT 14 hours ago

Anyone know the total cost of tokens to achieve this?

zb3 14 hours ago

Shh, maybe wait till weights are released.. without additional "guardrails", but I'm afraid that might not actually happen

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