Railway Security Disclosure

Well this is certainly interesting, I wonder how their secrets were being stored, I assumed they were stored in vault and then injected with a sidecar, but I guess not

Seen multiple folks in the Railway Discord confirming that their secrets stored in Railway have been used by third parties, so it definitely sounds like the attackers were able to read decrypted environment variables.

• numbsafari · 34 minutes ago

  Environment variables are a terrible place to store secrets. I'm just going to say it, since having said it non-stop for over 20 years, nobody seems to listen and we keep circling this drain. The 12 Factor manifesto was 100% wrong on this point. Use environment variables to point to where secrets are located, not to store their values.

  • zaik · 26 minutes ago

    systemd makes it easy: https://systemd.io/CREDENTIALS/

  • tptacek · 24 minutes ago

    Environment variables are generally fine for secrets. Environment files are problematic. Modern systems that inject secrets into the environment launch the program itself.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50177413

Postiz founder posted on X that his service is being brought down, his keys were already used and Railway was quiet about this until he spoke up: https://x.com/wickedguro/status/2113015432974405658

• lifeisloving · 24 minutes ago

  Why is a 300k mrr company (his tiwtter bio) running on raleway?

Jeez, what a rough past 24 hours for all security folk. Hang in there

• jacquesm · 1 hour ago

  It's going to be a rough decade.

  • rectang · 1 hour ago

    I really don't know how we are going to deal with accelerated exploit generation via LLMs — it blows up the disclosure processes we've evolved. The only thing I can think of is hunkering down with static HTML to reduce attack surface, but that's laughably incompatible with many many business requirements.

    • jacquesm · 47 minutes ago

      I think it will kill open source to some degree. I found it already very hard to imagine how the endless queues of issues were being dealt with so diligently, but at least there was a human on the other side. The torrent that is unleashed now is not manageable on a human scale. It's a highly automated arms race with a bunch of good-willing humans caught in the crossfire between large companies and criminals duking it out.

      • rectang · 29 minutes ago

        Could open source activity transition towards provably correct software, with far more modest feature sets? I don't have experience with proof based tools, so I'm not sure what's feasible.

        • jacquesm · 14 minutes ago

          A lot of people in the open source world actually enjoy the act of programming. Not all of them will enjoy prompting to the same degree, but to keep pace with the bad guys you will have to either join or find something else to do. That's going to be a big loss.

    • aaron_m04 · 26 minutes ago

      Business requirements will have to change. All your competitors are under the same pressure with the same shitty set of options, after all.

  • cortesoft · 1 hour ago

    It feels like the only solution is going to be proactively running your own AI agents looking for patches and applying them.

    • rectang · 1 hour ago

      The issue is where to direct the LLM's attention. Prompting the LLM to "look for vulnerabilities in PHP's multipart upload handling code" is going to find stuff that "look for vulnerabilities in PHP" won't.

    • jacquesm · 46 minutes ago

      Yes, so who will pay for that? Open source so far meant you would use your brains and your creativity, now you need to use your money too if you want to keep pace. From a 'guts, credits & glory' proposition to 'slop processor if you can afford it' is not really an upgrade.

    • cyberpunk · 40 minutes ago

      Or, you know, use client certificates so the bots can’t hit you. Those can leak / be stolen of course, but a bunch of my clients php apis survived as without a cert they’re told to fuck right off. It does make their client onboarding a bit harder but it’s a trade off which seems to have been the right one.

  • kilroy123 · 17 minutes ago

    It already _is_ a rough decade. I have hated the 20s so damn much.

• merlindru · 48 minutes ago

  job security!

• llama052 · 48 minutes ago

  I'm already tired, between pushing back on vibe coded internal projects being put onto the internet and then the constant barrage of CVEs that mean nothing. Then you have real security incidents that you need to tune into constantly.

It’s funny that every security breach disclosure now has a mandatory “the attacker used AI!” as if it absolves you from having to maintain a secure system. If anything it makes the situation more damning. If it was possible to find exploits using AI then your own red teaming should have found them before the attacker did.

• barrrrald · 1 hour ago

  This one doesn’t?

• arcanemachiner · 1 hour ago

  > your own red teaming should have found them before the attacker did Easier said than done. The defender has to do everything right, all the time, to prevent a headline like this. The attacker only needs to be right once, and it's game over. AI or no AI.

• gkoberger · 1 hour ago

  Unless they edited the post, they never said this. You should delete this; it's false information.

• tokioyoyo · 1 hour ago

  Defending is so much harder than attacking. You don't even have to focus on one target, as you can just mass-AI-script a lot of attacks wherever it's possible, and see what sticks. Even if you did everything right, there's always the social-engineering angle, or a single compromised device, or just accidental bad upgrade through supply chain. If you can mass-spread the seed, and plant something that "calls home" constantly, you can just have an agent that would start the attack the minute it gets infected, and go deeper. It's really a wild west right now, have no idea how we fix it. I'm assuming everything will get more concentrated in big co's hands, as having a very robust security is extremely hard. Also, we have to agree that younger people will start companies. There will be small companies that cannot afford red teams. There will be companies that are just not equipped, and their profit margins cannot sustain constant attacks.

• mbreese · 1 hour ago

  I didn’t actually see that in this post at all. They mention that the end goal of the attackers might be to get to AI inference providers. But I don’t think they are crying “AI was used” here. Or did I miss something?

• nrmitchi · 47 minutes ago

  > It’s funny that every security breach disclosure now has a mandatory “the attacker used AI!” This isn't in the article? They do not at all claim "the attacked used AI!". The only mention of "AI" is "We believe this is part of a series of attacks recently targeting platform companies with the aim of compromising AI inference providers." This is the same (apparently) end-goal as the Opencode breach last week, and is not blaming or finger-point at AI. It is stating (rightfully) that AI inference is very easy to resell and turn stolen credentials into cash.

Is this our new AI daily reality?

• iririririr · 1 hour ago

  companies probably have php and Python applications exposed to the web and nobody knows. the speed of irresponsible deployments is infinite now, by design

Fuck, I thought this was about trains

how are the secrets decrypted, I would like some explanation so that I can have some understanding here, I am starting to feel like all these companies are just meme-ing with their security posture. Like did someone vibe code too hard, how do env secrets leak for everyone...

• 9cb14c1ec0 · 1 hour ago

  Easy, all the bad guys need to do is access whatever system stores the decryption keys.

The past two days have been awful as someone who uses Railway.

I have a bad gut feeling that every day is going to look a bit like today with endless urgent patches and breaches. Fwiw it sounds similar to the hack over the weekend that opencode suffered.

• reconnecting · 1 hour ago

  I think the only way out is to go back to on-prem for everything, like in the 00s. LAN cables will go up in price soon.

  • solyin · 1 hour ago

    How does on-prem help if your product is a SaaS.

    • lawrenceduk · 1 hour ago

      You open a SaaS shop where people come to use it

    • codeulike · 57 minutes ago

      Instead of being a SaaS it will need to just become a S

    • 80fj0348i · 56 minutes ago

      You put the SaaS into a Box your customers can install into their datacenter!

      • reaperducer · 31 minutes ago

        Like back when you could rent a Google appliance.

      • doubled112 · 30 minutes ago

        What a brave new concept! Sometimes I do miss owning the hardware to run a thing. What I don't miss was having all of those appliances run a different base distro of Linux, each with varying levels of update support, while the security team keeps reading security scans to me.

  • seanw444 · 29 minutes ago

    Ha, Cyberpunk 2077 is becoming reality. We're proposing the Blackwall.

  • cyberax · 18 minutes ago

    I think we'll see a reduction in complexity and an increase in transparency, rather than just on-prem. One medium-sized server can now easily serve the entire banking system of a large country. So you don't need clusters of servers with careful tradeoffs between consistency and availability because of the CAP theorem. Just get a big honking host, slap Postres on it, and run your application server in a VM on the same host. For backup, export the WAL logs from Postgres onto your favorite off-site blob storage. UI for it? There's Pigsty. It still makes sense to host this in a cloud provider, just because you probably don't want to deal with actual hardware. And maybe get a second standby server for redundancy. That's it. You'll need a bunch of external dependencies for email, 2FA, observability, LLMs, and so on. But they should all be outgoing dependencies that should not allow access back into your system.

• yakz · 1 hour ago

  It's only just starting. It'll get worse before it gets better.

• Fordec · 1 hour ago

  I fully believe the only sustainable future is that hot patching will need to itself become fully automated. Hot patch now with a minimal allowed amount of line changes to head off the AIs, review it in office hours for auditing and the team is actually awake. My second belief is that environment variables as a development concept will need to be retired. If it's something that causes a security breach if it by its mere existence on a public git repo, it is information that by design cannot ever pass to a filesystem out of a chain of trust, not by mere development conventions people choose to adhere to.

  • munificent · 1 hour ago

    > hot patching will need to itself become fully automated. Great, even less control over the things we use and more power ceded to corporations.

    • Fordec · 1 hour ago

      Due to the small nature of hot patching (eg. bump this dependency, rotate these keys, turn off that config, follow the runbook) it will unlikely need to be a frontier model and is likely able to be done LocalLLM/Jev style decision making rather than having to hand all the keys to frontier model operators.

  • stabbles · 55 minutes ago

    Hot patching is itself a liability

    • Fordec · 35 minutes ago

      Not reacting is a liability. Blue-Green deployment is a liability. Code is itself a liability. Choosing this career at all is a liability.

• Sivart13 · 1 hour ago

  surely once there's been enough patches the code will be perfect though?

• 0x1F8B · 48 minutes ago

  The security team at my company is working with a frontier lab to scan all our code/systems. They are in a borderline panic to close every possible issue, even innocuous ones that are buried under defense in depth. Whatever they are seeing from our partner has them spooked -- as in "acceptable risk" is no longer a thing anymore.

• xtracto · 20 minutes ago

  The internet is over. We are going back to static htmls for public pages, and Point to Point VPN bases connections for B2B service provision. B2C? too risky to publish services online haha.

Damn I guess all those l33t hiring practices were for nothing

• rvz · 1 hour ago

  Of course, it was a giant scam that tested for nothing and optimized for how to pass a test . Let's see if companies are ready to hire more people who know what they are doing, against a super-intelligent swarm of millions of agents with cyber capabilities.

Train wreck. People were writing on discord 3 hours ago, 10 hours after the incident started, that keys created just for railway were running up usage. Meanwhile builds have been down for more than 12 hours. Only NOW did they just send out an email to all customers. I wouldn't have found out until then if I wasn't checking the discord periodically.

Do cloud providers have a lock-down mode where you can press 1 button and stop all spend?

• Aboutplants · 43 minutes ago

  Not a bad idea

  • tom1337 · 26 minutes ago

    It is… for their business.

Huh, I've been using Railway tonight and this was the first I've seen of this. Just got an email about it now too at 23:36

If you're on Railway do not wait, ROTATE every API key at the source, and do not set new values because Railway is still compromised and not secured.

Right just as I take my first day off (for the entire year!) from work to fly out for a vacation. The mother of all security bombs starts dropping all around stacks and services that I am responsible for. How else could have taken time off go for me…

• jjulius · 46 minutes ago

  Prioritize your mental health, go enjoy your vacation.

  • bryancoxwell · 39 minutes ago

    Strongly concur

• Liuser · 31 minutes ago

  Not your problem. Enjoy your vacation. Bus factor of 1 is poor planning of leadership.

• jazzyjackson · 31 minutes ago

  Brother do not cancel anything for these people, they do not care about you, it's their fault for not considering bus factor in their org chart. Why can't the person above you handle that?

• oofdere · 17 minutes ago

  I say this as a Railway customer, go take your vacation. The only time you should even reconsider is a massive bonus plus more time off for staying.

  • eecks · 13 minutes ago

    Correct me if I am wrong - if the API keys are compromised, then a large bill could be racked up?

How is it possible rotate keys if you disable deployments? You're basically telling us to take our services offline...

• tossstone · 53 minutes ago

  I've already taken my applications offline and will be migrating to a new host...

• frio · 28 minutes ago

  Yep. What an incredibly frustrating notice. I like Railway and I guess their hands are tied here, but wow.

I’m lucky I moved away from it to host my own db with coolify

• dgellow · 37 minutes ago

  That’s coming for all platforms unfortunately

Crazy day for cybersecurity: PHP RCE, eMudhra certificates, and now Railway. And it’s all just getting started imo. https://blog.cloudflare.com/emudhra-certificate-compromise https://www.wiz.io/blog/php2shell-php-rce

• tom1337 · 33 minutes ago

  Also GitLab https://docs.gitlab.com/releases/patches/patch-release-gitla...

  • vldszn · 28 minutes ago

    Madness..

• bokchoi · 27 minutes ago

  And litellm too

  • vldszn · 25 minutes ago

    true =(

• netvarun · 22 minutes ago

  I think the pingcap hack might be the biggest of them all, somehow it has gone under the radar. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50173716

  • corford · 17 minutes ago

    Jesus that one is bad

>We believe this is part of a series of attacks recently targeting platform companies with the aim of compromising AI inference providers. Is that an accusation? As in, major AI players taking out competitors ?

the worst service I've signed up for has to be railway. What a terrible product.

i revoked my api keys, changed with new ones but guess what? railway does not allow deployments at the moment, so my app is down.

Actually I will move my projects away from Railway. With AI what it is today, no reason to shy away from hosting on actual VPS. What is the best VPS to use today? Is it still hetzner or ovh?

It's time for competent programmers to get rehired to help patch massive exploits that are about to unfold before us.