TriShieldRAG introduces a three‑layered defense for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation: an Ingest Guard that screens documents, a Retrieval Scorer that re‑ranks based on trust, and a Cross‑LLM Consensus that validates evidence across three models. Against the original PoisonedRAG attack on the 2.68M‑passage Natural Questions corpus, the framework reduces attack success from about 79% to 1%. However, adaptive attacks that only alter document formatting can bypass the Ingest Guard and still achieve high success rates, revealing limits of layered defenses that rely on the same retrieved evidence.
By Susil Kumar Mohanty, Rohit Patel, Kosuru Yuvaraj, Jeenal Chaudhary, Disha Singhania
arXiv:2608. 02678v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to corpus poisoning: an attacker who inserts a crafted document into the retrieval corpus can steer the underlying large language model (LLM) toward an attacker-chosen wrong answer.
By Abay Zhurekbay, Tao Liu, Fan Li
arXiv:2604. 08304v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) extends large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge, but this access path also introduces security risks that existing work often conflates with inherent LLM flaws.
By Yuming Xu, Mingtao Zhang, Zhuohan Ge, Haoyang Li, Nicole Hu, Yongqi Zhang, Zhiyuan Wen, Jason Chen Zhang, Qing Li, Lei Chen
arXiv:2608. 04756v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), post-retrieval conflict resolution arbitrates among noisy or contradictory retrieved passages.
By Zijian Wang, Yubo Zhu, Muzhi Dong, Yanjun Lou, Yisheng Li, ZiLiang Zhang, Wei Tong, Yuan Zhang, Jingyu Hua, Sheng Zhong
arXiv:2610.33849v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Query-time filters that screen each retrieved document before it reaches the generator are the dominant published defense against retrieval-augmented...
By Pushkal Kumar, Arvin Sahaym
arXiv:2604.08304v5 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge, but this access path creates security ris...
By Yuming Xu, Mingtao Zhang, Zhuohan Ge, Haoyang Li, Nicole Hu, Yongqi Zhang, Zhiyuan Wen, Jason Chen Zhang, Qing Li, Lei Chen
RAG-Safety-Bench is a benchmark designed to evaluate how retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) affects the safety of large language models (LLMs). It isolates safety impacts by testing four conditions: non-RAG, RAG with an oracle document, RAG with related but non-answer documents, and RAG with random safe documents. Results on five open-source LLMs reveal an inverse relationship between benign and unsafe capabilities, show that baseline safety guardrails do not guarantee safety in RAG, and confirm that even benign documents can trigger unsafe generation.
By Adithiyan Rajan Indira Saravanan, Kathleen C. Fraser
arXiv:2406.00083v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by retrieving relevant information from external knowledge bases t...
By Jiaqi Xue, Mengxin Zheng, Yebowen Hu, Fei Liu, Xun Chen, Qian Lou
arXiv:2606. 18310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Injecting malicious knowledge into retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems can manipulate retrieved evidence and mislead downstream generation, posing a serious security threat for AI applications.
By Xinru Liu, Xianglong Zhang, Di Cai, Zhumin Chen, Pengfei Hu, Xin Xin
arXiv:2609.00470v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds large language models in external corpora, but implicit trust in retrieved documents creates a critical at...
By Muhaimin Bin Munir, Akib Jawad Ononto, Nazia Shehnaz Joynab, Bhavani Thuraisingham, Latifur Khan
arXiv:2607. 23838v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) lets a large language model answer questions using documents retrieved from an external knowledge base at query time.
By Susil Kumar Mohanty, Rohit Patel, Kosuru Yuvaraj, Jeenal Chaudhary, Disha Singhania
The paper surveys attacks and defenses in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a technique that improves large language models by grounding outputs in external knowledge. It identifies new robustness and security risks such as corpus poisoning, backdoor attacks, privacy leakage, and fairness violations, and notes that existing surveys inadequately cover attacker objectives, threat models, and stage-specific defenses. The survey offers a unified, pipeline-aware overview, formalizing threat models across the corpus, retriever, and generator, categorizing attacks by accuracy, privacy, and fairness, and reviewing defenses for retrieval, rerank, generation, and traceback stages, while also summarizing robustness benchmarks and explainability methods.
By Minh Tran, Cuong Dang, Tuc Nguyen, Khanh-Tung Tran, Minh Huynh Nguyen, Trinh Chau, Kien Le, Do Xuan Long, Jiahao Zhang, Hoang D. Nguyen, Thanh Le, Suhang Wang