CyRC Vulnerability Advisory: CVE-2024-5185 Data Poisoning Vulnerability in EmbedAI Application

May 27, 2024 / 1 min read

Table of Contents

Exploitation
Impact
Remediation
Discovery credit
About CVSS

Overview

The Black Duck Cybersecurity Research Center (CyRC) has exposed a data poisoning vulnerability in the EmbedAI application. EmbedAI allows users to interact with documents by utilizing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs).

This vulnerability could result in an application becoming compromised, leading to unauthorized entries or data poisoning attacks. These attacks are enabled by a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability created by the absence of a secure session management implementation and weak cross-origin resource-sharing policies.

Exploitation

An attacker can direct a user to a malicious webpage that exploits a CSRF vulnerability within the EmbedAI application. By leveraging this CSRF vulnerability, the attacker can deceive the user into inadvertently uploading and integrating incorrect data into the application’s language model.

Affected software

EmbedAI "main" branch

Impact

Exploitation of this vulnerability could affect the immediate functioning of the model and can have long-lasting effects on its credibility and the security of the systems that rely on it. This can manifest in various ways, including the spread of misinformation, introduction of biases, degradation of performance, and potential for denial-of-service attacks.

CVSS base score: 7.3 (High)
CVSS 3.1 vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H

Remediation

The CyRC reached out to the developers but has not received a response within the 90-day timeline dictated by our responsible disclosure policy. The CyRC recommends removing the applications from networks immediately.

Discovery credit

This vulnerability was discovered by Mohammed Alshehri, a security researcher at Black Duck.

Timeline

February 26, 2024: Initial contact attempt
April 4, 2024: Second contact attempt
May 1, 2024: Final contact attempt
May 3, 2024: Black Duck confirms disclosure to SamurAI
May 29, 2024: Advisory published by Black Duck

References

https://github.com/SamurAIGPT/EmbedAI

About CVSS

FIRST.Org, Inc (FIRST) is a non-profit organization based out of US that owns and manages CVSS. It is not required to be a member of FIRST to utilize or implement CVSS but FIRST does require any individual or organization give appropriate attribution while using CVSS. FIRST also states that any individual or organization that publishes scores follow the guideline so that anyone can understand how the score was calculated.