Language Model Security Database

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…

LLM agents integrating with external environments (e.g., via tool use, web retrieval, or RAG) are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection attacks. Malicious instructions embedded in untrusted data sources—such as emails, webpages, or tool outputs—are ingested by the agent and treated as valid context. Because the backend Large Language Model (LLM) struggles to distinguish between system instructions, user instructions, and third-party data, these embedded prompts can hijack the execution flow…

LLM-powered agentic systems that use external tools are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks that cause them to bypass their explicit policy instructions. The vulnerability can be exploited through both direct user interaction and indirect injection, where malicious instructions are embedded in external data sources processed by the agent (e.g., documents, API responses, webpages). These attacks cause agents to perform prohibited actions, leak confidential data, and adopt unauthorized…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems utilizing dense (e.g., BERT-based) or sparse (e.g., BM25) retrievers are vulnerable to black-box adversarial prompt injection attacks. By employing a gradient-free Differential Evolution (DE) optimization algorithm (referred to as DeRAG), an attacker can generate short adversarial suffixes (typically ≤ 5 tokens). When these suffixes are appended to a user query, they manipulate the retriever's ranking mechanism to promote a specific, malicious, or…

Large Language Model (LLM) systems integrated with private enterprise data, such as those using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), are vulnerable to multi-stage prompt inference attacks. An attacker can use a sequence of individually benign-looking queries to incrementally extract confidential information from the LLM's context. Each query appears innocuous in isolation, bypassing safety filters designed to block single malicious prompts. By chaining these queries, the attacker can…

A remote code execution (RCE) and privilege escalation vulnerability exists in Large Language Model (LLM) multi-agent systems and agentic RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) architectures. The vulnerability arises from "Inter-Agent Trust Exploitation," where LLM agents implicitly trust instructions received from peer agents, bypassing safety guardrails and jailbreak defenses that are active during direct human-to-LLM interaction. An attacker can inject a malicious command payload (e.g., a…

A vulnerability exists in the tool selection mechanism of Large Language Model (LLM) agents that utilize a retrieval-then-selection pipeline (RAG) for identifying executable tools. The vulnerability, known as "ToolHijacker," allows a remote attacker to manipulate the agent's decision-making process by injecting a malicious tool document into the accessible tool library (e.g., via third-party tool hubs or plugins). The attack employs a two-phase optimization strategy to craft a malicious tool…

Large Language Model (LLM) agents operating in stateful environments (web browsers, operating systems, and tool-use contexts) are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection and multi-modal adversarial attacks. These vulnerabilities arise when agents process untrusted environmental observations—such as web accessibility trees, screen screenshots, or database query results—that contain concealed malicious instructions. Specifically, attackers can embed prompt injections into HTML accessibility…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to a targeted corpus poisoning attack known as "CorruptRAG". This vulnerability allows an attacker to manipulate the response of an LLM to a specific target query by injecting a single malicious document into the RAG knowledge database. Unlike traditional poisoning attacks that require flooding the retrieval results (top-N) with malicious content to outnumber correct information, CorruptRAG succeeds with a single retrieved document.