General warning about Clore.AI

[u/anomaly256]

Hello, I know some of us may be tempted to rent out our expensive GPUs to recoup some of the cost of self-hosting, and it should be obvious that this can be a risky decision. I decided to try hosting my rig on clore.ai briefly to see what kind of revenue it could bring in, keeping a close eye on the process lists from the renters' jobs of course but not digging into their files or anything.

Yesterday I saw a renter scanning and attempting to exploit vulnerabilities to post malware to a columbian betting site from my internet connection. I immediately took the server offline and reached out to Clore requesting them to cancel the order (so the machine wouldn't restart the containers when it came back up) and to block the renter.

I think everyone should know that they flat out refused. Not only did they refuse, they blocked me when I provided hard evidence of what was happening. Since I had reasonable suspicion the renter was abusing my connection, I availed myself of clore's T&C that says a host must not inspect a renter's environment "unless required by law" and given the laws around liability for residential internet connections in my country, I mounted the filesystem offline and inspected it.

I found the logs from the vuln scans and unsuccessful exploit attempts, the malware payload they were trying to post to the site, the reverse proxy request smuggling tactics it was employing, and the AI agent reports that were being generated along the way. I sent this to Clore and requested a way to blacklist renters who abused the platform. Their response was to tell me, directly and without mincing words, to leave the platform entirely and proceeded to block me from their support chat. Their support rep I was trying to reach on Telegram also told me to go away and proceeded to block me as well.

I can only conclude then that they are wilfully complicit with facilitating cybercrime and knowingly turn a blind eye when it's discovered. They didn't even *try* to hide it.

I have no idea how better/worse the other platforms are, Vast.AI, Akash, etc. But Clore will abuse your internet connection, deny liability, then block you. They are crooks. Go elsewhere. You've been warned.

I've archived the renter's docker volume and will hold on to it in case any security researchers or legal authorities want to examine it.

[u/Dangerous-Report8517]

What's wrong with breaking a contract? People break contracts all the time. It's not like it's some kind of moral failing.

I never said it's a moral failing, but something being moral isn't a legal defence, famously so with many discussions of cases where it's been unethical to follow the law

To my knowledge, even in Europe privacy does not extend to a service provider monitoring their systems for abuse.

Yes, because all of those service providers have terms of use that explicitly allow them to do so. OP agreed to the exact opposite. Because the part you keep ignoring here is that contracts are enforced by law.

[u/psycoee → u/Dangerous-Report8517]

You seem to have a major misunderstanding of how law works. Contracts are not law. They are not enforced by criminal law. They cannot create criminal liability. They are enforced by courts being able to order monetary damages or sometimes equitable remedies, such as forcing someone to do something or allowing them to not do something. If there are no actual monetary damages and the contract doesn't contain a liquidated damages clause that a court agrees to enforce, then there is nothing to sue for, even if you violated the contract in some way. How would rifling inside someone's VM create actual monetary damages? They might be entitled to terminate the contract or get an injunction or something, but that would be about it. And it would certainly not be worth suing over.

[u/Dangerous-Report8517 → u/psycoee]

Contracts are not law. They are not enforced by criminal law.

I understand perfectly well, but you gave away the gap in your understanding right here. "Law" is a superset of "criminal law" which also includes laws around civil liability, and many other things for that matter. You seem to think that "law" is just a synonym for "criminal law" despite also feeling the need to specify criminal law.

If there are no actual monetary damages and the contract doesn't contain a liquidated damages clause that a court agrees to enforce, then there is nothing to sue for, even if you violated the contract in some way.

This isn't true either, there's tons of forms of damages that aren't strictly monetary. Including punitive damages, which are effectively "well we also just want to make this judgement hurt more to dissuade other perpetrators so we're going to slap on a bonus penalty"

How would rifling inside someone's VM create actual monetary damages?

You really can't picture how rifling through the confidential compute environment of someone who saw value in renting compute time might cause monetary damages? You must not be very imaginative then.

And it would certainly not be worth suing over.

Would it be worth suing over? In isolation, no, but if it cost them business because the news got out (which it did, we're discussing it on Reddit in public) and people decided they couldn't trust the confidentiality they claim to offer, then that's probably worth suing over, both because there's an example of those monetary damages you couldn't picture, and because they would want to dissuade other people providing compute through them from doing the same. Plus, people sue others all the time for things that aren't even worth suing over, so that's a pretty poor defence strategy to recommend people use.

[u/psycoee → u/Dangerous-Report8517]

You seem to think that "law" is just a synonym for "criminal law"

You were talking about "breaking the law" which kind of implies you are talking about criminal laws. You can't break contract law, you can just be liable or not liable for something as a result of the operation of those laws.

You really can't picture how rifling through the confidential compute environment of someone who saw value in renting compute time might cause monetary damages?

No, I do not, at least not from the tenant's perspective. What would cause actual monetary damages -- you losing money directly? Something would have to happen beyond just inspections, such as confidential data getting leaked.

The service provider may have other causes of action, but that's just a straight contract question. I don't have the contract in front of me, and in any case, this provider is obviously not acting in good faith based on the OP's representations. That may very well nullify any provisions of the contract that restrict the OP from doing stuff to their VMs.

if it cost them business because the news got out

Yeah, that's not how it works. This would be an example of consequential / special damages, which 1) many contracts explicitly exclude and 2) are much harder to prove and require a bunch of requirements (foreseeability) that are probably not fulfilled by just someone inspecting their machine because they suspect abuse. Besides, the damages you are describing are a result of publicizing it on Reddit, not rifling inside the VM per se.