Thursday, 21st December 2023
OpenAI Begins Tackling ChatGPT Data Leak Vulnerability (via) ChatGPT has long suffered from a frustrating data exfiltration vector that can be triggered by prompt injection attacks: it can be instructed to construct a Markdown image reference to an image hosted anywhere, which means a successful prompt injection can request the model encode data (e.g. as base64) and then render an image which passes that data to an external server as part of the query string.
Good news: they've finally put measures in place to mitigate this vulnerability!
The fix is a bit weird though: rather than block all attempts to load images from external domains, they have instead added an additional API call which the frontend uses to check if an image is "safe" to embed before rendering it on the page.
This feels like a half-baked solution to me. It isn't available in the iOS app yet, so that app is still vulnerable to these exfiltration attacks. It also seems likely that a suitable creative attack could still exfiltrate data in a way that outwits the safety filters, using clever combinations of data hidden in subdomains or filenames for example.
Pushing ChatGPT’s Structured Data Support To Its Limits. The GPT 3.5, 4 and 4 Turbo APIs all provide “function calling”—a misnamed feature that allows you to feed them a JSON schema and semi-guarantee that the output from the prompt will conform to that shape.
Max explores the potential of that feature in detail here, including some really clever applications of it to chain-of-thought style prompting.
He also mentions that it may have some application to preventing prompt injection attacks. I’ve been thinking about function calls as one of the most concerning potential targets of prompt injection, but Max is right in that there may be some limited applications of them that can help prevent certain subsets of attacks from taking place.