Meta's Muse AI agent can expose shared conversations through discoverable links, researchers say
Researchers: Meta's Muse AI agent can expose sensitive shared chats because its web links are easy to enumerate.
Muse lets users share searches, conversations, images and similar content with other people. Such share features usually involve clicking an option to create a unique URL that anyone can use to load a page hosting the content. To keep potentially sensitive information from being accessible to unintended people, the URLs typically contain a long sequence of text that cannot be easily guessed.
Muse, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month was “built from the ground up for privacy and security,” appears to take the same precautions, Ars Technica reported. But the report said a central design decision for constructing URLs has made the links easy to discover.
Claroc researchers said they were able to enumerate 6,800 links that Muse users created for sharing conversations with others. After opening a few hundred of them, the researchers found information that was clearly not intended to be publicly available, according to the report.
Ars Technica's headline said the exposed material included users' personal and business secrets. The report tied the findings to links created through Muse's sharing feature, which is meant to let users distribute searches, conversations, images and similar content.
The issue turns on how the sharing URLs are built. If the links can be enumerated, content that users meant to share with selected recipients may become reachable by others who discover the URLs. Claroc's researchers said their enumeration produced thousands of Muse conversation links, and the few hundred they opened included material not meant for public access.
Ars Technica reported that Muse is Meta's new general-purpose AI agent. Zuckerberg's description of the product's privacy and security design was made last month, before the researchers reported their findings.
Editor's Summary
Claroc researchers said they enumerated 6,800 Muse conversation-sharing links and found sensitive information in a few hundred they opened. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said Muse was built for privacy and security. The reported URL design makes shared conversations discoverable through links that can be enumerated.