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Items tagged security, promptengineering

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Let ChatGPT visit a website and have your email stolen. Johann Rehberger provides a screenshot of the first working proof of concept I’ve seen of a prompt injection attack against ChatGPT Plugins that demonstrates exfiltration of private data. He uses the WebPilot plugin to retrieve a web page containing an injection attack, which triggers the Zapier plugin to retrieve latest emails from Gmail, then exfiltrate the data by sending it to a URL with another WebPilot call.

Johann hasn’t shared the prompt injection attack itself, but the output from ChatGPT gives a good indication as to what happened:

“Now, let’s proceed to the next steps as per the instructions. First, I will find the latest email and summarize it in 20 words. Then, I will encode the result and append it to a specific URL, and finally, access and load the resulting URL.” # 19th May 2023, 3:34 pm

Delimiters won’t save you from prompt injection

Prompt injection remains an unsolved problem. The best we can do at the moment, disappointingly, is to raise awareness of the issue. As I pointed out last week, “if you don’t understand it, you are doomed to implement it.”

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Prompt injection explained, with video, slides, and a transcript

I participated in a webinar this morning about prompt injection, organized by LangChain and hosted by Harrison Chase, with Willem Pienaar, Kojin Oshiba (Robust Intelligence), and Jonathan Cohen and Christopher Parisien (Nvidia Research).

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How prompt injection attacks hijack today’s top-end AI – and it’s really tough to fix. Thomas Claburn interviewed me about prompt injection for the Register. Lots of direct quotes from our phone call in here—we went pretty deep into why it’s such a difficult problem to address. # 26th April 2023, 6:04 pm

The Dual LLM pattern for building AI assistants that can resist prompt injection

I really want an AI assistant: a Large Language Model powered chatbot that can answer questions and perform actions for me based on access to my private data and tools.

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New prompt injection attack on ChatGPT web version. Markdown images can steal your chat data. An ingenious new prompt injection / data exfiltration vector from Roman Samoilenko, based on the observation that ChatGPT can render markdown images in a way that can exfiltrate data to the image hosting server by embedding it in the image URL. Roman uses a single pixel image for that, and combines it with a trick where copy events on a website are intercepted and prompt injection instructions are appended to the copied text, in order to trick the user into pasting the injection attack directly into ChatGPT. # 14th April 2023, 6:33 pm

Prompt injection: What’s the worst that can happen?

Activity around building sophisticated applications on top of LLMs (Large Language Models) such as GPT-3/4/ChatGPT/etc is growing like wildfire right now.

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Indirect Prompt Injection on Bing Chat (via) “If allowed by the user, Bing Chat can see currently open websites. We show that an attacker can plant an injection in a website the user is visiting, which silently turns Bing Chat into a Social Engineer who seeks out and exfiltrates personal information.” This is a really clever attack against the Bing + Edge browser integration. Having language model chatbots consume arbitrary text from untrusted sources is a huge recipe for trouble. # 1st March 2023, 5:29 am

Just used prompt injection to read out the secret OpenAI API key of a very well known GPT-3 application.

In essence, whenever parts of the returned response from GPT-3 is executed directly, e.g. using eval() in Python, malicious user can basically execute arbitrary code

Ludwig Stumpp # 3rd February 2023, 1:52 am

You can’t solve AI security problems with more AI

One of the most common proposed solutions to prompt injection attacks (where an AI language model backed system is subverted by a user injecting malicious input—“ignore previous instructions and do this instead”) is to apply more AI to the problem.

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Twitter pranksters derail GPT-3 bot with newly discovered “prompt injection” hack. I’m quoted in this Ars Technica article about prompt injection and the Remoteli.io Twitter bot. # 16th September 2022, 6:33 pm

I don’t know how to solve prompt injection

Some extended thoughts about prompt injection attacks against software built on top of AI language models such a GPT-3. This post started as a Twitter thread but I’m promoting it to a full blog entry here.

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Prompt injection attacks against GPT-3

Riley Goodside, yesterday:

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