NEAR AI Restores Cloud Hours After Internal Security Breach

NEAR AI restored its cloud inference service on November 10 after detecting unauthorized access to internal systems and temporarily suspending operations. The company said it closed the unauthorized access, patched vulnerabilities across its servers and replaced affected credentials before bringing the platform back online.

The service resumed approximately four hours after NEAR AI’s initial public disclosure. The company confirmed that NEAR Protocol and other NEAR services were unaffected by the incident.

The breach was first disclosed late on November 9, when NEAR AI suspended cloud inference as a precaution while investigating the unauthorized access.

A subsequent security update confirmed that the unauthorized access had been closed, although cloud operations remained suspended until the infrastructure could be safely restored.

NEAR AI has not disclosed how the attacker gained access, which internal systems were compromised or how long the intrusion lasted.

Customer Prompts Protected by Hardware Isolation

NEAR AI emphasized that its confidential inference workloads operate inside hardware-isolated trusted execution environments (TEEs), designed to prevent unauthorized access to customer prompts during processing.

The company’s private inference infrastructure uses Intel TDX and NVIDIA confidential computing to isolate sensitive workloads from the underlying host environment. Prompts are encrypted and processed inside protected enclaves, preventing infrastructure operators and NEAR AI itself from reading their contents under normal operating conditions.

Cryptographic attestation also allows users to verify that supported inference requests were processed within the intended secure environment.

These protections distinguish access to internal administrative systems from access to customer prompts processed inside secure enclaves. However, NEAR AI’s initial announcements did not establish the full scope of the intrusion or provide a comprehensive assessment of potentially exposed information.

The company’s service terms acknowledge that hardware isolation reduces security risks without eliminating vulnerabilities associated with the underlying hardware, firmware or execution environment.

NEAR AI Cloud provides confidential AI inference to developers and applications, including Brave’s Leo AI assistant, which expanded its use of NEAR AI’s protected infrastructure in October.

The service also supports private AI models used for cybersecurity research, following the company’s October 29 launch of additional security-focused models and its NEAR AI Red initiative.

The interruption was confined to NEAR AI’s cloud infrastructure. The company reported no disruption to the NEAR Protocol blockchain, which operates independently of its hosted inference services.

NEAR AI has not identified the party responsible for the intrusion or disclosed whether additional customer-facing security measures will be required. Its latest announcement confirmed that the affected vulnerabilities had been fixed on every server and that a full incident report would be released shortly.

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