arXiv AI

TriShieldRAG: 3 Rings, One Blind Spot in Layered Defenses for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

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.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

RAG-Safety-Bench: Reliable Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented LLM Safety

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 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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 10

RAG-Safety-Bench: Reliable Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented LLM Safety

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 standard safety guardrails do not guarantee safety in RAG, and confirm that even benign documents can trigger unsafe outputs.

arXiv AI
Aug 6

Breadcrumbing Search Agents

arXiv:2608. 04565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based search agents are widely used for information-seeking tasks, but their reliance on external tool returns introduces a critical security risk: web content retrieved during execution is untrusted, exposing agents to prompt injection and goal hijacking.

By Xuebin Li, Hanqing Zhao, Siyuan Liang, Kejiang Chen, Weiming Zhang, Dacheng Tao, Nenghai Yu
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 Computation and Language
Aug 27

A Layered Security Framework Against Prompt Injection in RAG-Based Chatbots

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