AI leaks private keys from crypto wallets

AI Copilot may surface private keys from real cryptocurrency wallets.

The OpenAI Copilot code-writing AI assistant may propose private keys from real cryptocurrency wallets, according to The Register.

According to one of the developers, Copilot suddenly suggested something resembling a wallet’s private key. It turned out to be linked to a real account.

“I was shocked. The private key is like a lock to your treasury: if it is leaked, your assets could be stolen,” the programmer said.

Another developer suggested that Copilot had extracted information from public GitHub repositories. The AI assistant remembered public data and, with the right prompt, surfaced it.

Apparently, the private key did appear in public GitHub repositories. The developers speculated that it was created for testing purposes. The wallet was active and used to send and receive real tokens.

Some developers also managed to locate private keys. They turned out to be linked to other crypto wallets, some of which contained small sums of money.

Former OpenAI research scientist Ari Herbert-Voss suggested that the key leak occurred because they were stored in publicly accessible locations.

“People are excited that this is yet another way to locate wallets to siphon off, but note that all of them were publicly accessible anyway,” he said.

Ari Herbert-Voss suggested that potentially valuable accounts may already have been emptied.

“The real risk is that someone fails to notice and continues to use a compromised wallet,” he added.

Earlier, OpenAI said it would add a personal information filter to Copilot that would exclude personal data such as phone numbers and home addresses from training sets.

In June 2021, GitHub introduced the Copilot code-autocompletion tool. The assistant was created in collaboration with OpenAI based on the Codex language model.

In July, the tool was suspected of copying code fragments protected by copyright.

In October, researchers found that 30% of new code on GitHub was written with Copilot.

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