Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks With Spotlighting

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14720v1
• Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2024 15:26:23 GMT
• Title: Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks With Spotlighting
• Authors: Keegan Hines, Gary Lopez, Matthew Hall, Federico Zarfati, Yonatan Zunger, Emre Kiciman,
• Abstract summary: In common applications, multiple inputs can be processed by concatenating them together into a single stream of text. Indirect prompt injection attacks take advantage of this vulnerability by embedding adversarial instructions into untrusted data being processed alongside user commands. We introduce spotlighting, a family of prompt engineering techniques that can be used to improve LLMs' ability to distinguish among multiple sources of input.
• Score: 11.127479817618692
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs), while powerful, are built and trained to process a single text input. In common applications, multiple inputs can be processed by concatenating them together into a single stream of text. However, the LLM is unable to distinguish which sections of prompt belong to various input sources. Indirect prompt injection attacks take advantage of this vulnerability by embedding adversarial instructions into untrusted data being processed alongside user commands. Often, the LLM will mistake the adversarial instructions as user commands to be followed, creating a security vulnerability in the larger system. We introduce spotlighting, a family of prompt engineering techniques that can be used to improve LLMs' ability to distinguish among multiple sources of input. The key insight is to utilize transformations of an input to provide a reliable and continuous signal of its provenance. We evaluate spotlighting as a defense against indirect prompt injection attacks, and find that it is a robust defense that has minimal detrimental impact to underlying NLP tasks. Using GPT-family models, we find that spotlighting reduces the attack success rate from greater than {50}\% to below {2}\% in our experiments with minimal impact on task efficacy.

Related papers

• Aligning LLMs to Be Robust Against Prompt Injection [55.07562650579068]
  We show that alignment can be a powerful tool to make LLMs more robust against prompt injection attacks. Our method -- SecAlign -- first builds an alignment dataset by simulating prompt injection attacks. Our experiments show that SecAlign robustifies the LLM substantially with a negligible hurt on model utility.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-07T19:34:35Z)
• Human-Interpretable Adversarial Prompt Attack on Large Language Models with Situational Context [49.13497493053742]
  This research explores converting a nonsensical suffix attack into a sensible prompt via a situation-driven contextual re-writing. We combine an independent, meaningful adversarial insertion and situations derived from movies to check if this can trick an LLM. Our approach demonstrates that a successful situation-driven attack can be executed on both open-source and proprietary LLMs.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-19T19:47:26Z)
• ASETF: A Novel Method for Jailbreak Attack on LLMs through Translate Suffix Embeddings [58.82536530615557]
  We propose an Adversarial Suffix Embedding Translation Framework (ASETF) to transform continuous adversarial suffix embeddings into coherent and understandable text. Our method significantly reduces the computation time of adversarial suffixes and achieves a much better attack success rate to existing techniques.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-02-25T06:46:27Z)
• Signed-Prompt: A New Approach to Prevent Prompt Injection Attacks Against LLM-Integrated Applications [0.0]
  This paper introduces the 'Signed-Prompt' method as a novel solution for prompt injection attacks. The study involves signing sensitive instructions within command segments by authorized users, enabling the LLM to discern trusted instruction sources. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the Signed-Prompt method, showing substantial resistance to various types of prompt injection attacks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-15T11:44:18Z)
• SmoothLLM: Defending Large Language Models Against Jailbreaking Attacks [99.23352758320945]
  We propose SmoothLLM, the first algorithm designed to mitigate jailbreaking attacks on large language models (LLMs) Based on our finding that adversarially-generated prompts are brittle to character-level changes, our defense first randomly perturbs multiple copies of a given input prompt, and then aggregates the corresponding predictions to detect adversarial inputs.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-10-05T17:01:53Z)
• Evaluating the Instruction-Following Robustness of Large Language Models to Prompt Injection [70.28425745910711]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional proficiency in instruction-following. This capability brings with it the risk of prompt injection attacks. We evaluate the robustness of instruction-following LLMs against such attacks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-08-17T06:21:50Z)
• Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injection [64.67495502772866]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being integrated into various applications. We show how attackers can override original instructions and employed controls using Prompt Injection attacks. We derive a comprehensive taxonomy from a computer security perspective to systematically investigate impacts and vulnerabilities.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-02-23T17:14:38Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.