Compromised LiteLLM 1.107.0 on PyPI Installs a Credential Stealer and Backdoor

No no it's really important that I have 5-factor authentication on every website and it requires me to go through the whole login process again every time I break eye contact.

> All the sandbox-exec and all the Lulu rules are not going to protect against something like this.

No, you can block this with sandboxing tools. For my LLM agents, I use a tool called Nono, whose macOS implementation is built on the same foundation as sandbox-exec. One of the key features it supports (and it's not the only tool that does this) is proxying and the injection of credentials via the proxy. For example, when I run Codex at work, Codex does not have access to my Azure AI Foundry API credentials. It sends out requests via dummy credentials, and the proxy injects the real ones outside the sandbox.

The other thing that proxy does is let you restrict network access in various ways. So you can run something like LiteLLM so that it doesn't have access to the internet at large; it can only talk to Azure AI Foundry or AWS Bedrock or whoever your inference provider is. You sandbox LiteLLM separately from your agents, and you give it access to much less. The software firewall stuff isn't perfect but it is a significant defense against things like this.

There are also lots of other restrictions that are easy to do which mitigate this. Nono blocks access to the root of $HOME, then selectively allows access to paths within it, and also explicitly blocks access to common paths to secrets. So it's pretty easy to make sure that access to important things are blocked: SSH credentials, GnuPG socket (and local Unix sockets in general), local OS keyrings, etc.

The way I use tools like this is exclusively by writing policy, testing it, and revising where the policy is inadequate. I never get approval fatigue because I don't do approvals.

You're right that attacks like this are hard to defend against, and that we're used to tool sprawl, and also that LLMs can do things like install tools we don't expect them to themselves! But there are ways to anticipate and mitigate attacks like this. Sandboxing tools (including contained and VMs) that support credential injection are genuinely useful for this.

This is seriously one of the reasons I see Rust as quite suspicious(with its 200-300 dependencies in all builds), unlike golang where you can actually create a full app with no dependencies.

Sandboxing should be built in to your windows manager like: https://decentstat.es/posts/shai-halud-nix-housing/

Yes it’s messed up. I was thinking about pi agent and the extensions getting updates every three hours.

What are you talking about? Even dependency cooldown of 24h is enough to protect the consumers from these breaches. The attack did not have any novelty, used a newly registered look-alike domain for C2 and a PTH technique which is now known.

Sandbox comes in for the unknown ones and yes, its a pain to get the profile right.

Fuchsia solved that

> Unix and Linux solved all this even before Alexander III of Macedon started wearing his nappies

I mean, didn't Linux shells invent pop-up fatigue? I thought we (yes, we) all used to -y flag preemptively so the upgrades and installations/setups go through. Linux really did do it first, the agents are just more needy and their popups more verbose now, but not exactly new.

VM isn't a silver bullet.

Canary token is great to tell you've been hacked.

There are ways to try to prevent this from happening in a first place. I wrote kow (keys-on-the-wire) to fix this. Apps only see placeholder tokens. The proxy injects real key from the vault into outbound requests for allowed hosts.

Author here. Apache-2.0. [1] https://keysonthewire.com [2] https://github.com/inflightsec/keys-on-the-wire

This is awesome, why did I just learn about this! Gonna add these all over my homelab

TIL! this is cool

Yeah it's not totally unlike people who consider learning that they've been hacked is worth more than $x and so, even if they're not into cryptocurrencies, they leave the equivalent of $x on their computer in a "software wallet", in an obvious place.

It's not a guaranteed you'll know you've been hacked, but it's still quite a flag to leave. And there are services doing the equivalent of what you posted, but for cryptocurrencies: they contact you through email, SMS, snail mail even, if they detect that "coins at address ..." ever move.

And buried under the lede is that one of the compromised people was one of the organization owners. So it seems like the culture of insecurity comes from the top, which is unfortunate especially bc they keep acting like "this could've happened to anyone guys"

there's another one this summer that didn't get as much attention (or any at all) which allowed exfiltrating master provider keys with any authenticated user/virtual key

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-84377

I looked at the code a year ago and decided I will always avoid it.

Indeed, I don't think I'm upgrading ever again. I'll stuck with 1.04.2 for a year or two. Feels like a Russian rulette at this point.

The compromise appears somewhere in the build and deploy system.

> No public commit in BerriAI/litellm contains data = "cook" or a cook/ folder.

> SafeDep assesses, with moderate to high confidence, that BerriAI’s private release pipeline built these wheels from an attacker-modified git source.

Every harness thinking right now… "if we want do something like this we won't even have to compromise anything."

Sarcasm?

Hi threecheese,

Pinning is a good idea.

So far, we believe it came from the github oauth cli tokens which are embedded in claude code tool responses - https://docs.litellm.ai/blog/security-incident-oct-21-2026#g...

It's something we're still investigating. I'll update my thread on this post, as we learn more!

It's not a novel attack: it's novel negligence.

The best improvement would be to blame yourselves instead of Claude.

> specific situations in which Claude Code will embed a user's GitHub CLI OAuth token into a response body, and in situations where response bodies are logged, these tokens may appear in LiteLLM logs.

That's pretty hand wavy. What did y'all have CC doing that it had your GitHub CLI OAuth token in its context at all?

Stuff like this is why my coding agent is a coding agent not shell agent that basically own the machine. Mine has no tool for shell use narrow tools specific things like ripgrep, finding files, and deleting files that limit the paths to explicit workspace directory.

I take care of commits, push/pull, building wheels, and publishing wheels myself. It really doesn't take the much time and the coding agent frees up a lot of my time.

Original articles says it was likely a comprimised maintainer machine?

Amateur hour again.

If that's right then attestations wouldn't have saved anyone here either. They prove which workflow published the wheel, not what source that workflow checked out. A private pipeline building from the same-looking repo still gives you a perfectly valid attestation.

What would catch it is someone rebuilding from the public tag and comparing the result, which almost nobody does for the python wheels. I have been treating attestations as the answer for my own project's releases, so this is a good reminder of where they stop.

We have 7d cooldown on packages on an internal pypi proxy but that blocks security updates also, which we now have to manually exclude from the cooldown.

I’m unsure how to automate this properly, maybe an LLM is the best starting point.

I use safechain for this, because there is always gonna be another package manager configured wrong. https://github.com/AikidoSec/safe-chain

I didn't realize they've all such added that, this was a change we made to our own projects last year when these first started - glad to see it's common.

Risk is ensuring enough security researchers are finding these and quarantining these before that default cooldown lapses.

The last time I looked for information, I remember seeing that the median supply chain attack was in place for multiple months to years before being discovered. Cooldowns shorter than that seem like snake oil.

I’d imagine there were probably fixes for critical CVEs that were included …. A lot of companies are on a 24 hour timeline to get them out.

I wonder if in some cases it's not so much that people are updating too quickly, but rather, their deployment pipelines do not have pinned / frozen versions attached to their builds.

Then we’ll find out about malware 24 - 48 hours later.

all popular, free, ungated software will be poisoned; like kesler syndrome but for the world of open source software.

[dead]

What's interesting here is that this will only affect those who did not migrate off LiteLLM after it was attacked the first time.

I'm not saying everyong should migrate after there's a vuln, but I'm definitely saying that. Unless it's something huge and foundational like a programming language (PHP gets a second chance), just migrate within the next couple of weeks.

I didn't even have it installed the first time, so the ideal programmers, (read, your competition), actually suffered 0 vulns from this dep, if you suffered 1, that's already pretty bad, being burnt twice should be a wake up call. If you get hit 3 times by the same dependency, it's a lost case.

Yeah, thinking that after the last supply chain attack, people would be smarter than ship things with LiteLLM.

Is that you Max?

Déjà vu for both of us, huh?

So they sell advance access to information that will allow me to hack other people's LiteLLM instances?

Seems a little unethical

That just shifts the risk

Sounds like a reasonable choice of a language.

I myself have written a small llm proxy in Go, doing nothing but injecting the real API key to outgoing requests while itself validating virtual keys it generates, and it works great.

If you don't use any LLM router, it's infinity times faster, and infitesimally as targetted.

it's just the poor styling of the selection highlight colour.

Bytesafe (https://bytesafe.dev). Pure Dependency Firewall, not a package host, with usage based pricing.

Not sure about a service, but PMG enforces dependency cooldown and sandbox on package install. https://github.com/safedep/pmg

This one ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46909037

I use it, I don't cooldown, proper version pinning for me.

Socket.dev

Tell em Tom Zubiri sent ya (I don't get a commission, just good karma)

man, people are going to be sorely disappointed in what's free on the internet in a couple of years.

Agents and malware will eradicate all goodwill left.

Good by internet.

[flagged]

Yes if you use LLM to analyse everything. Not really if you analyse diffs, with heuristics to select candidates for LLM/agent based analysis. But at the cost of missing out novel attacks.

If you can use uv, try the --exclude flag, e.g.:

    uv pip install -r requirements.txt --exclude excludes.txt

excludes.txt is basically like an inverse requirements.txt. Your requirements.txt could have this...

    pandas
    scikit-learn
    matplotlib

...while excludes.txt has this...

    numpy

... and uv would resolve the dependencies in requirements.txt, excluding numpy from the dependency graph entirely and ignoring any dependencies that would have been introduced by numpy itself.

EDIT: You can also configure this for uv directly in a pyproject.toml file:

    [tool.uv]
    exclude-dependencies = ["numpy"]

That's not what's being said, at all. They are simply telling their enterprise customers that there is a different build pathway for the enterprise builds and that pathway wasn't impacted by this issue.

Also if you don't like organizations fixing vulns without releasing the open source first, you're going to be upset when you learn how every major vuln and associated patches are distributed long before the fixes hit the repos. A timely example of this is PHP, literally today.

Note: I work at LiteLLM

There exists a critical vulnerability which affects only Enterprise LiteLLM deployments, and does not affect OSS deployments.

We have provided our customers with patched releases distributed via a private registry and are allowing them some time to update their deployments before we release the fix in our public registry and disclose the vulnerability details. Releasing the fix publicly in an open source product would be a de-facto vulnerability disclosure.

don't forget today's NodeJS security update addressing its own RCE bugs!

is the google outage related to a security incident?

There are over 8 billion people on Earth, and some subset of the computer systems that they all use are going to have issues, every day.

It's really not as bad as the accumulated headlines and exploitative hype make it sound.

It's similar to the mass hysteria and moral panics over things like child abduction. Media reports make certain dangers seem much more important than they really are, when considered in context.

Welcome to the AI era, every week in the near future

Hi abletonlive,

I appreciate the feedback. We work hard to make every release safe and secure. The attack was novel, and I'd love your feedback on how we can improve our ci/cd further.

https://docs.litellm.ai/blog/security-incident-oct-21-2026#h...