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
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:2608.21656v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for combining large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge sources. How...
By Ziliang Zhang, Yubo Zhu, Wei Tong, Jingyu Hua, Zijian Wang, Yuan Zhang, Sheng Zhong
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:2508.02312v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs), now a foundation in advancing natural language processing, power applications such as text generation, machine...
By Kang Chen, Xiuze Zhou, Yuanhui Yu, Yuanguo Lin, Hefeng Chen, Congyu Cai, Li Shen