arXiv Computation and Language

GraphRAG-LTM: A Layered Threat Modeling Framework for Attacks on Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

GraphRAG-LTM is a Layered Threat Modeling framework designed to evaluate security vulnerabilities in Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG). It introduces three nested attacker access levels—BB Query, WB Query, and Graph-aware WB—that manipulate query ranking, retriever gradients, and graph evidence to degrade answer quality. Experiments across datasets, retrievers, and LLM backbones show that rank feedback alone lowers answer quality, gradient access amplifies query attacks, and deleting bridge triplets further disrupts multi‑hop evidence propagation.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

RAGSentinel: Certifiable Geometric Consensus for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation

RAGSentinel is a training‑free, label‑free defense designed for black‑box retrieval‑augmented generation systems. It employs a surrogate encoder to detect hidden‑state shifts caused by retrieved documents, removes shared topic directions, and filters poisoned documents as geometric outliers from a robust majority consensus. The method is proven to recover a poison‑free majority context under honest‑majority and representation‑separation assumptions, and experiments show it keeps attack success rates low while maintaining accuracy across multiple datasets, LLM families, and adaptive attacks.

By Yueyang Quan, Anjun Gao, Yufei Xia, Minghong Fang, Zhuqing Liu
arXiv AI
Oct 5

Hop-Decayed Influence: New Vulnerabilities of Structural Auxiliary Indexing in GraphRAG Pipelines with LLM

The paper introduces the Hop-Decayed Influence (HDI) attack, which targets auxiliary schema-level structures—semantic summaries, hierarchical edges, and pre-computed scores—used in GraphRAG pipelines for retrieval prioritisation. By propagating query-aware influence, HDI identifies high-impact targets and corrupts a minuscule fraction (as low as 0.016%) of these structures, achieving an 88–94% success rate across HotpotQA and 2WikiMultiHopQA benchmarks on Microsoft GraphRAG and HippoRAG2 architectures. The modifications affect up to six queries each, yielding a 1:N amplification that instance-level attacks cannot achieve, and they evade perplexity and paraphrase defenses with over 99% evasion, exposing a structural blind spot in current GraphRAG defenses.

By Jisung Park, John Le, Heath Cooper
arXiv AI
1d ago

S-GAP: Stealthy Graph Attack Primitives for Graph Large Language Models

The paper introduces S‑GAP, a stealthy graph attack primitive that unifies textual and structural perturbations into a single coherent attack intent for Graph Large Language Models (GraphLLMs). By iteratively refining the semantic content of the GAP through a multi‑agent framework, S‑GAP achieves higher attack success rates and produces more relationally plausible perturbations compared to existing methods. Experiments on four datasets and three GraphLLMs demonstrate an average 7.02% improvement in attack success rate, revealing significant vulnerabilities in current GraphLLMs.

By Wenda Li, Tongya Zheng, Shunyu Liu, Hanyang Yuan, Kaixuan Chen, Yu Wang, Yuchen Ying, Haoze Jiang, Huan Li, Gang Chen, Zujie Ren
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Securing Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Taxonomy of Attacks, Defenses, and Future Directions

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 Machine Learning
Jul 3

Embedding Inference Attack

arXiv:2607. 01276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embedding models are essential components of modern Information Retrieval (IR) systems, yet they are typically hidden behind APIs.

By Cedric Fitiavana Raelijohn, S\'ebastien Gambs, Jean-Francois Rajotte
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

RAGuard: A Layered Defense Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems Against Data Poisoning

arXiv:2607. 26339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems ground large language models (LLMs) in external corpora, but this reliance exposes them to corpus poisoning: maliciously injected passages that manipulate retrieved evidence.

By Pushkal Kumar, Tucker Nielson, Tanish Kolhe, Shubham Zala, Vincent Li