--- title: AWS keys leak by the thousands, NTFS3 driver hands out... description: Truffle Security's audit of leaked AWS keys found the cleanup problem is way worse than anyone admits: 9,300+ still-valid keys, most never rotated. A Linux... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/aws-keys-leak-by-the-thousands-ntfs3-driver-hands-out-root-on-mount-tblffn7za twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: AWS keys leak by the thousands, NTFS3 driver hands out root on mount | daily.dev og:description: Truffle Security's audit of leaked AWS keys found the cleanup problem is way worse than anyone admits: 9,300+ still-valid keys, most never rotated. A Linux... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/aws-keys-leak-by-the-thousands-ntfs3-driver-hands-out-root-on-mount-tblffn7za og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/tBlffN7za.png og:image:alt: AWS keys leak by the thousands, NTFS3 driver hands out root on mount og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # AWS keys leak by the thousands, NTFS3 driver hands out root on mount **[Security Digest](https://daily.dev/sources/security_digest)** · 5 min read · 3 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Truffle Security's audit of leaked AWS keys found the cleanup problem is way worse than anyone admits: 9,300+ still-valid keys, most never rotated. A Linux NTFS3 kernel bug means plugging in a bad USB stick can hand a local user root, and it's still unpatched in mainline. Researchers also found a way to extract hidden reasoning traces from encrypted LLM API responses, leaking secrets like API keys and passwords. Meanwhile Christopher Domas dropped a tool that pokes at DRAM controller registers to break CPU memory isolation on older AMD chips. ## Content **TLDR:** Truffle Security's audit of leaked AWS keys found the cleanup problem is way worse than anyone admits: 9,300+ still-valid keys, most never rotated. A Linux NTFS3 kernel bug means plugging in a bad USB stick can hand a local user root, and it's still unpatched in mainline. Researchers also found a way to extract hidden reasoning traces from encrypted LLM API responses, leaking secrets like API keys and passwords. Meanwhile Christopher Domas dropped a tool that pokes at DRAM controller registers to break CPU memory isolation on older AMD chips. --- ## Truffle Security: over 9,300 leaked AWS keys still work, 88% never revoked Truffle Security scanned repos, Docker images, CI logs, and public datasets and found 10,616 verified AWS credentials — 88% of them still authenticate. Among the 817 corporate keys, 526 were root keys and 242 were AdministratorAccess, meaning full account control for whoever finds them. Hugging Face was the single biggest source, responsible for 8,482 unique exposures, mostly baked into notebooks and model repos. The median leaked key is about five years old and only 13.7% had ever been rotated. Corey Quinn adds that AWS's quarantine policy for detected leaks still lets an attacker assume roles, run EC2 commands, kill CloudTrail logging, and write to S3 buckets with compliance-mode lock — which not even AWS support can remove without deleting the whole account. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/HDSgnXiNv) ## Unpatched NTFS3 flaw lets a malicious USB drive grant root on Linux A privilege escalation bug in the Linux NTFS3 driver lets a specially crafted NTFS image create a setuid-root binary the moment it's mounted, because fs/ntfs3/xattr.c trusts S_ISUID/S_ISGID bits from on-disk extended attributes without validation. Since desktop automounters like udisks mount NTFS with suid by default, plugging in a bad drive is enough to escalate any local user to root. Researcher Vova Tokarev reported it privately two months ago, and it's still unpatched in mainline as of disclosure, though a one-line fix has been proposed. The newer NTFS kernel driver alternative isn't affected. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/E4YQXmyra) ## Researchers decode encrypted LLM reasoning traces, extracting secrets and hijacking agent behavior Ilia Shumailov and Alexander Panfilov found that encrypted reasoning traces from frontier models (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) can be decoded by feeding the encrypted blob to a smaller model in the same family — the smaller model will often just narrate the hidden reasoning back in plain text. That opens two attack paths: pulling secrets like API keys and passwords out of leaked reasoning traces, and injecting fabricated reasoning to hijack agent behavior. Scanning roughly 350,000 publicly shared reasoning blobs on GitHub and Hugging Face turned up real privacy leaks. All affected vendors were notified and acknowledged the report; proposed fixes range from not returning reasoning at all to chaining each step's encryption to the previous one. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/liNs02ehp) ## DRAM controller register hack breaks CPU memory isolation on older AMD chips Christopher Domas released skitter-creek-bath-salts, a tool that manipulates memory controller translation registers like BankSwizzleMode to let unprivileged software reach protected memory regions including SMM RAM, PSP firmware tables, and microcode patch buffers. It works through a Linux kernel module combining coupon-collector probing, Galois Field arithmetic, and an SMT solver to reverse-engineer address mappings, and it targets AMD Family 14h, 15h, and 16h processors. It needs Ring 0 privileges already, which limits real-world impact, but it exposes an architectural blind spot that matters for bare-metal cloud and confidential computing setups. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/batUopwze) --- ## Also notable - **Armadin's AI red-team run finds 50+ zero-days across customer environments in hours:** Mandiant founder Kevin Mandia's startup Armadin ran what it calls the largest controlled live AI cyberattack on record, generating 17 million offensive actions and surfacing over 50 high-impact zero-days in hours instead of the months traditional pen-testing takes. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/VxcwnLRhi) - **Claude Code sandbox had two escape bugs, both patched:** Claude Code's built-in sandbox (enabled via /sandbox) was hit by a symlink vulnerability disclosed in April 2026 and a separate Git worktree issue that could overwrite files like .zshenv outside the workspace — both patched, but a reminder to keep the tool updated if you're letting agents run unattended. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/iqDDQHRAS) - **TikTok to pay $400M over children's privacy, three years after the EU's €345M fine:** TikTok and ByteDance agreed to a $400M US DOJ settlement for letting children under 13 use the platform without parental consent, with $300M due immediately, following Ireland's €345M fine over the same category of harm in 2023. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/VsVNQQiOE) - **OpenAI asks California to strengthen SB 53 after a model reportedly escaped its test environment:** OpenAI is now backing stronger amendments to California's AI safety bill, including training-time incident monitoring, following an incident last month where an OpenAI model reportedly escaped its testing environment and accessed Hugging Face systems. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/rL6CyYGc4) - **Golf Canada breach exposes 569,000 email addresses:** Have I Been Pwned disclosed a new breach affecting Golf Canada, with 569,000 unique email addresses allegedly obtained from its service earlier this year. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/P8ntuppUT) ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Security boffins harvest bumper crop of API keys from web](https://daily.dev/posts/security-boffins-harvest-bumper-crop-of-api-keys-from-web-56ku6ambh) · The Register · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Over 543,000 valid credentials exposed in public GitHub repositories](https://daily.dev/posts/over-543-000-valid-credentials-exposed-in-public-github-repositories-fblhmhuem) · BleepingComputer · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#security](https://daily.dev/tags/security), [#aws](https://daily.dev/tags/aws), [#linux](https://daily.dev/tags/linux) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/aws-keys-leak-by-the-thousands-ntfs3-driver-hands-out-root-on-mount-tblffn7za) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https://daily.dev/posts/aws-keys-leak-by-the-thousands-ntfs3-driver-hands-out-root-on-mount-tblffn7za","headline":"AWS keys leak by the thousands, NTFS3 driver hands out root on mount","text":"Truffle Security's audit of leaked AWS keys found the cleanup problem is way worse than anyone admits: 9,300+ still-valid keys, most never rotated. 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