RAG Vulnerabilities

A vulnerability exists in frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) where in-context information (e.g., provided via Retrieval-Augmented Generation) completely overrides parametric safety guardrails when processing counterfactual or adversarial medical evidence. When a prompt contains fabricated clinical context asserting the medical efficacy of toxic substances, illicit drugs, or nonsensical items, the LLM suppresses its internal knowledge of the substance's toxicity. Internal representation…

Reasoning-capable Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentic AI systems exhibit a critical vulnerability to contextual distractors, resulting in catastrophic performance degradation (up to 80% drop in accuracy) and emergent misalignment. When the input context contains noise—specifically random documents, irrelevant chat history, or task-specific "hard negative" distractors—the models fail to filter this information. Instead of ignoring the noise, the models disproportionately attend to…

Web-facing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) and retrieval poisoning via web-native markup and Unicode carriers. Standard ingestion pipelines often parse untrusted web pages without stripping invisible constructs, such as hidden HTML spans, off-screen CSS, alt text, ARIA attributes, and zero-width characters. When an attacker embeds malicious instructions within these invisible carriers on third-party sites, the RAG system retrieves…

AutoArgue, an LLM-based evaluation framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, is susceptible to evaluation subversion attacks due to the public availability of its judging prompts and reference data structures. An adversarial RAG system (exemplified by the "Crucible" probe) can incorporate "insider knowledge" of the evaluation logic directly into its generation pipeline. By wrapping the generation process with the evaluator's specific prompts, the system can pre-filter…

The Google Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), specifically within the reference implementation built using the Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) and Gemini models, contains vulnerabilities allowing for both indirect and direct prompt injection. The architecture fails to sufficiently isolate the Large Language Model (LLM) context from untrusted external data sources and user inputs.

Personalized LLM agents utilizing long-term memory systems are vulnerable to a safety bypass known as intent legitimation. Benign, organically accumulated user memories can bias the model's intent inference, causing it to misinterpret inherently harmful queries as contextually justified. When a malicious request semantically aligns with a user's established persona (e.g., hobbies, mental health history, routine), the model normalizes the request and complies, effectively bypassing standard…

The STEP-LLM framework, utilized for generating Computer-Aided Design (CAD) STEP files (ISO 10303) from natural language, exhibits a safety alignment vulnerability during the fine-tuning of base Large Language Models (specifically Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct and Qwen-2.5-3B). The training pipeline employs Depth-First Search (DFS) reserialization and Reinforcement Learning (RL) with Scaled Chamfer Distance rewards to optimize for geometric fidelity and syntactic validity of Boundary Representation…

Neural Ranking Models (NRMs) utilizing Transformer architectures (specifically BERT and T5-based re-rankers) are vulnerable to minimal adversarial perturbations that artificially promote a target document's rank. The vulnerability allows an attacker to manipulate ranking outcomes by inserting or substituting a single "query center" token—a word identified as the semantic centroid of the user's query—into the target document. The attack exploits the model's sensitivity to specific semantic…

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a vulnerability to "hard-to-falsify" deceptive evidence injection, termed the "Facade of Truth." This vulnerability allows an attacker to override an LLM’s parametric knowledge (internal factual beliefs) by injecting sophisticated, iteratively refined fabricated evidence into the context window. Unlike overt misinformation which models typically reject, this attack utilizes a multi-agent adversarial framework (MisBelief) to generate evidence that mimics…

Large Language Model (LLM) agents utilizing external tool execution frameworks are vulnerable to Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) via the "Tool Stream." Unlike traditional data-stream injections (e.g., malicious emails), this vulnerability exploits the agent's interpretation of functional tool definitions (docstrings, signatures) and runtime feedback (error messages, return values) as binding operational constraints. Adversaries functioning as compromised or malicious tool providers can embed…