> Most of the Tailscale SSH issues we've identified concern privilege escalation. In some circumstances, someone already authorized to connect over Tailscale SSH may be able to perform actions beyond the permissions of their configured local user, including potentially gaining elevated privileges.
I think they're just writing cautiously because they're midway through the investigation and don't want to give false confidence. Doesn't seem worth reading too much into it until they provide a more thorough write up.
The underlying writeup can be found at https://tailworm.com/
Thanks for linking that. The debate about these issues will rage on, but I do wonder whether giving Tailscale two hours of notice before public release was the right call? The arguments from the post are that "rapid awareness of these flaws will expediate remediation" and that they were "discovered with low effort". Does the author mean that simply pointing Claude at Tailscale identified (a non-trivial subset) of these vulnerabilities, and did the author not feel that Tailscale had a track record of responding to vulnerabilities, via a coordinated disclosure, in a timely manner? I would personally have liked to see a bit more of a justification of the almost-immediate publication against the potential risks to users, vs. e.g. waiting a day or two.
10,000 words of claudish, it's not worth reading.
Obviously tailscale has some great devs, security is complex.
There is some weaselly language.
In some circumstances default config? with password? this is a condition leading to the next
someone already authorized to connect over Tailscale SSH they have access, but it may be limited or restricted, although scope could be beyond the intended
may be able to perform actions beyond the permissions If there is a full moon and your brother in law's second cousin is wearing a hat, he may be able to use your upstair's thermostat provided you have a second story.
Given what just happened with PHP a few days so, it's not surprising to me that they're holding their cards close to their chest. People will already be doing their damnedest to reverse engineer the exploit with this meager info.
There's already a public writeup.
Have you seen the slopreport for the vulnerability?
I fully understand being carefully worded when you need serious brain power just to figure out every claim in the logorrhea
> Obviously tailscale has some great devs, security is complex.
Quick reminder that in recent months Tailscale has had issues with age-old classic vulnerabilities such as input validation.
The problem with Tailscale is twofold.
First their attack surface is too big. They continuously shoehorn new features into the product.
Second they don't appear to do regular deep-dive code audits and instead they appear to rely mostly on the goodwill of third-parties to poke at select areas of their code as and when those third-parties feel like it. Hence simple vulnerabilities such as input validation keep on popping up.
Fancy SOC2 certificates are not the same thing. That's just dogfood for the corporate auditors.
At $work we are busy working on removing Tailscale. The bells and whistles of Tailscale sure are attractive candy, but we simply can't overlook the security risk of what has become a bloated product.
A security researcher colleague of mine was/is exploring an unauthenticated avenue along this line. I don’t have any update, she told me she didn’t feel comfortable exposing information to anyone other than Tailscale staff until she’s confident in what she found or didn’t.
we'd love to hear about it at security@tailscale.com, we're happy to work from & with and credit early ideas as well.
I will send her your message!