Nepenthes is a tarpit to catch AI web crawlers

Haha, this would be an amazing way to test the ChatGPT crawler reflective DDOS vulnerability [1] I published last week.

Basically a single HTTP Request to ChatGPT API can trigger 5000 HTTP requests by ChatGPT crawler to a website.

The vulnerability is/was thoroughly ignored by OpenAI/Microsoft/BugCrowd but I really wonder what would happen when ChatGPT crawler interacts with this tarpit several times per second. As ChatGPT crawler is using various Azure IP ranges I actually think the tarpit would crash first.

The vulnerability reporting experience with OpenAI / BugCrowd was really horrific. It's always difficult to get attention for DOS/DDOS vulnerabilities and companies always act like they are not a problem. But if their system goes dark and the CEO calls then suddenly they accept it as a security vulnerability.

I spent a week trying to reach OpenAI/Microsoft to get this fixed, but I gave up and just published the writeup.

I don't recommend you to exploit this vulnerability due to legal reasons.

[1] https://github.com/bf/security-advisories/blob/main/2025-01-...

I am not surprised that OpenAI is not interested if fixing this.

Their security.txt email address replies and asks you to go on BugCrowd. BugCrowd staff is unwilling (or too incompetent) to run a bash curl command to reproduce the issue, while also refusing to forward it to OpenAI.

The support@openai.com waits an hour before answering with ChatGPT answer.

Issues raised on GitHub directly towards their engineers were not answered.

Also Microsoft CERT & Azure security team do not reply or care respond to such things (maybe due to lack of demonstrated impact).

why try this hard for a private company that doesn't employ you?

Ego, curiosity, potential bug bounty & this was a low hanging fruit: I was just watching API request in Devtools while using ChatGPT. It took 10 minutes to spot it, and a week of trying to reach a human being. Iterating on the proof-of-concept code to increase potency is also a nice hobby.

These kinds of vulnerabilities give you good idea if there could be more to find, and if their bug bounty program actually is worth interacting with.

With this code smell I'm confident there's much more to find, and for a Microsoft company they're apparently not leveraging any of their security experts to monitor their traffic.

Make it reflective, reflect it back onto an OpenAI API route.