Inadvertent Context Leakage in Language Models
arXiv:2608. 19857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For AI agents to be useful beyond simple chat, they must hold sensitive user context such as calendars, credentials, health records, and financial data.
The paper introduces LeakGauge, a method that appends a suffix to a model’s input to gauge the risk of context leakage before decoding. By mapping prefill token probabilities to an attack‑risk score, LeakGauge achieves high AUROC (0.944–0.996) across 11 large language models, including GLM‑5.2 and Kimi‑K3, and remains robust to language changes and different attack styles. The approach also demonstrates sensitivity to internal leakage directions and can be implemented with fewer than 0.5K additional parameters and minimal latency.
arXiv:2608. 19857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For AI agents to be useful beyond simple chat, they must hold sensitive user context such as calendars, credentials, health records, and financial data.
For AI agents to be useful beyond simple chat, they must hold sensitive user context such as calendars, credentials, health records, and financial data. We study whether the mere presence of such secrets in a model's context window introduces hidden correlations into the model's benign outputs, allowing reconstruction even when the model correctly refuses direct extraction.
arXiv:2609.36612v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unlearning in large language models (LLMs) is typically evaluated at the output level, where a model appears to suppress sensitive or undesirable conte...
arXiv:2608. 02657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic LLMs are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection (IPI) attacks, e.
arXiv:2606. 14210v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in privacy-sensitive domains, where users must balance the risk of data exposure through external APIs against the high computational cost of local deployment.
PrivDrift is a benchmark that tests whether user‑disclosed secrets can still be recovered by large language models after the conversation shifts to unrelated topics. It includes 1,000 controlled multi‑turn dialogues with seeded secrets, topic‑drift turns, and standardized extraction probes. Experiments on three LLMs with extended context windows show that dialogue‑level leakage remains substantial—between 38.7% and 54.6%—and is influenced by model, secret type, and persuasion intensity, while additional topic drift does not reliably reduce leakage.
arXiv:2608.02657v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic LLMs are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection (IPI) attacks, e.g., malicious side-tasks hidden in external tool results. While man...
SpecGuard is an inference‑time backdoor detector that leverages speculative decoding—using a small draft model to propose tokens and a target model to verify them—without adding extra model computation. By monitoring the draft‑token acceptance rate, SpecGuard detects when a target model shifts toward attacker‑controlled behavior while the draft model does not, signaling a backdoor trigger. The method reliably identifies a range of backdoor types, including stealthy attacks that bypass input‑level filters, across multiple model families.
The paper investigates privacy risks in agentic AI systems that assemble sensitive data into a hidden context before responding. It introduces context‑inference attacks, a security game that evaluates how well attackers can recover this hidden context under varying levels of knowledge and indirect delivery. Experiments show that even with controls such as instructions not to disclose, logit suppression, and context dilution, agents can leak significant contextual information, achieving high success rates across multiple attack settings.
arXiv:2609.38830v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse attention is widely used to accelerate long-context inference in modern large language models (LLMs), but its input-dependent execution behavior...
SpecGuard is an inference‑time backdoor detector that leverages speculative decoding—using a draft model to propose tokens and a target model to verify them—without adding extra model computation. By monitoring the draft‑token acceptance rate, SpecGuard identifies when a target model’s behavior shifts toward attacker‑controlled outputs, a signal that appears whenever a backdoor is triggered. The method works across various backdoor types and model families, reliably detecting stealthy attacks that bypass input‑level filters while avoiding the extra generation cost of existing runtime detectors.
arXiv:2609.14003v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Personal AI agents built on large language models (LLMs) are increasingly given access to a user's private data and communications in order to provid...