Meta’s Muse AI Assistant Rolled Out With a Serious Security Flaw

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone to great lengths to hype the security of its new AI assistant, Muse, claiming it is “built from the ground up for privacy and security.” A zero-day vulnerability that gives locally run apps and terminal commands complete control of the agent raises serious doubts. Further raising questions, Amazon on Sunday began blocking Muse from its site.

Meta introduced Muse a few weeks ago. The assistant “books appointments, fills out forms and handles customer service,” “proactively takes tasks off your plate,” and can “make purchases, generate images, create documents, and connect with your favorite apps and services.” The macOS app (curiously, there’s no Windows version) also works with a user’s WhatsApp, email, calendar, and social media accounts. When a task requires a tool that doesn’t exist, Muse creates one on the fly.

Meta Doth Hype Muse Security Too Much

Of course, for Muse to do any of these things, users must first give it access to their accounts. This includes authenticating the assistant to each service and, because the app runs on macOS, giving it permissions to a broad range of operating system-restricted device resources, like writing files to disk, accessing the mic and camera, and monitoring location and calendars. Apple has spent years developing these defenses to prevent installed apps or commands entered into the terminal from accessing these resources, clearly because the company considers them a security threat. Muse completely undoes these default measures.

More than 12 hours after this post went live, Meta said it released a hotfix that patched the 0-day.

“To me, the bar is infinitely higher in terms of the security of these apps. They don’t have to be perfect, but when you take a look at Muse, it’s like they didn’t, in my opinion, think about security, which is really worrisome,” Wardle said. “At the very least, they should be thinking about security from the very start, and they are just not.”