The AI Supply Chain Attack Surface Nobody's Actually Checking
There's a lot of noise in AI security right now — a lot of people repeating vendor slide decks without ever having opened a pickle file in a hex editor. So let's walk through the actual attack surface: how it works, why it works, and what you can run today to check whether a model or package is safe before it touches your machine.
This isn't theoretical. Every technique below has been used against real companies, with real payloads, and in some cases real bug bounty checks cut as proof.
1. Pickle: The Original Sin of ML Model Distribution
Most ML models get saved via serialization — converting a live Python object into a file on disk. Pickle is the default format for this in Python, showing up with .pkl or .pt extensions. It's the packing-everything-into-one-box approach: convenient, compact, and — critically — able to contain more than data.
