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:2606. 31639v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are no longer only text generators.
By Seyed Bagher Hashemi Natanzi, Bo Tang
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
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
The paper introduces a three‑layer security framework designed to protect retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) chatbots from both direct and indirect prompt injection attacks. Layer 1 filters user input with rule‑based patterns and a semantic anomaly classifier; Layer 2 enforces a provenance‑based instruction hierarchy during context assembly; Layer 3 audits model output with a policy rule engine and semantic drift detector. Evaluations on GPT‑4o, Llama 3, and Mistral 7B demonstrate a reduction in attack success rate from 71.4 % to 11.3 %, outperforming existing single‑layer defenses while keeping false positives low and latency acceptable.
By Gulshan Saleem, Nisar Ahmed, Muhammad Imran Zaman, Ali Hassan, Umar Mujahid
arXiv:2509. 20324v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an emerging approach in natural language processing that combines large language models (LLMs) with external document retrieval to produce more accurate and grounded responses.
By Atousa Arzanipour, Rouzbeh Behnia, Reza Ebrahimi, Kaushik Dutta
arXiv:2510. 15476v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as interfaces to information, code, and real-world services, making prompt-level security failures a practical concern.
By Hanbin Hong, Shuang Wu, Shuya Feng, Nima Naderloui, Shenao Yan, Jingyu Zhang, Ali Arastehfard, Heqing Huang, Yuan Hong
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
arXiv:2608.23181v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance in coding capabilities, their potential in cybersecurity has drawn increasing research attention,...
By Jian Yang, Haau-Sing Li, Shawn Guo, Zixi Zhao, Yibo Tan, Jiajun Wu, Aishan Liu, Xianglong Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Bryan Dai, Chengran Yang
RAG-CT is a defense mechanism designed to protect Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems from leaking personally identifiable information (PII). It works by detecting malicious queries through analysis of entropy and margin distributions, applying a score-based detection method. Experiments across four attack strategies and four baseline defenses on two datasets show that RAG-CT significantly reduces PII leakage while outperforming existing defenses, all without altering the underlying LLM or retriever.
By Xingyu Lyu, Jiayimei Wang, Jianfeng He, Ning Wang, Yidan Hu, Yimin Chen
arXiv:2609.37669v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is increasingly used to enhance Large Language Model (LLM)-based software vulnerability detection by grounding p...
By Sabrina Kaniewski, Tim Kr\"amer, Julius B\"achle, Markus Enzweiler, Michael Menth, Tobias Heer