RAG Vulnerabilities

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems in the health domain are vulnerable to corpus poisoning attacks where adversarial documents—specifically those generated via "Liar" (fabricated from scratch based on an incorrect stance) and "Few-Shot Adversarial Prompting" (FSAP)—are injected into the retrieval pool. When these adversarial documents are retrieved and presented as context, they successfully override the Large Language Model's (LLM) internal safety alignment and ground-truth…

Large Language Model (LLM)-based Automated Program Repair (APR) systems—such as SWE-agent, OpenHands, and AutoCodeRover—are vulnerable to adversarial manipulation via crafted bug reports. These systems accept unvetted natural language issue descriptions as trusted input to synthesize code patches. An attacker can exploit this trust by submitting semantically plausible but malicious bug reports designed to mislead the APR agent. By leveraging the semantic gap between natural language…

A zero-click indirect prompt injection vulnerability, CVE-2025-32711, existed in Microsoft 365 Copilot. A remote, unauthenticated attacker could exfiltrate sensitive data from a victim's session by sending a crafted email. When Copilot later processed this email as part of a user's query, hidden instructions caused it to retrieve sensitive data from the user's context (e.g., other emails, documents) and embed it into a URL. The attack chain involved bypassing Microsoft's XPIA prompt injection…

GPT-OSS-20B exhibits "agentic-only" vulnerabilities where safety guardrails effective in standalone model inference fail when the model operates within an agentic execution loop. These vulnerabilities emerge when the model is deployed in a multi-step agentic architecture (e.g., utilizing LangGraph, tool usage, and memory retention). Attackers can bypass safety filters by employing context-aware iterative refinement attacks, which incorporate the full agentic state—including tool outputs…

Multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems are vulnerable to compositional privacy leakage, a flaw where sensitive information is exposed through the aggregation of individually benign responses from distinct agents. In distributed architectures where data is siloed (e.g., distinct agents handling HR, Finance, and IT logs), individual agents lack a global view of the user’s accumulated knowledge or the sensitive attributes derivable from cross-agent data combinations. An attacker can…

Large Language Models (LLMs), including GPT-4o, LLaMA-3, and GPT-3.5-Turbo, are vulnerable to multimodal prompt injection attacks. These models fail to distinguish between system-level instructions and user-provided content within the context window. Attackers can exploit this by embedding malicious instructions in direct text, indirect sources (such as third-party webpages or PDFs), or visual inputs (images). Successful exploitation results in the model prioritizing the injected adversarial…

Large Language Models (LLMs) integrated with external retrieval mechanisms (e.g., Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), web search, or email processing) are vulnerable to Indirect Prompt Injection. This vulnerability occurs when an LLM consumes input from untrusted external sources—such as websites, code repositories, or incoming emails—that contain embedded adversarial prompts. Unlike direct injection, where the user attacks the model, here the "poisoned" data is retrieved by the system…

A vulnerability exists in aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) where a harmful instruction can be obfuscated through a multi-step formalization process, bypassing safety mechanisms. The attack, named Prompt Jailbreaking via Semantic and Structural Formalization (PASS), uses a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent to dynamically construct an adversarial prompt. The agent learns to apply a sequence of actions—such as symbolic abstraction, logical encoding, mathematical representation, metaphorical…

LLM-based search agents are vulnerable to manipulation via unreliable search results. An attacker can craft a website containing malicious content (e.g., misinformation, harmful instructions, or indirect prompt injections) that is indexed by search engines. When an agent retrieves and processes this page in response to a benign user query, it may uncritically accept the malicious content as factual and incorporate it into its final response. This allows the agent to be used as a vector for…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to knowledge poisoning attacks (specifically the "PoisonedRAG" method) where an attacker injects adversarial texts into the retrieval knowledge database. These adversarial texts are optimized to achieve two simultaneous goals: 1) rank highly (top-k) during the retrieval phase for specific target queries, and 2) semantically steer the Large Language Model (LLM) to generate a pre-defined, attacker-chosen response instead of the ground…