Posts tagged security in May, 2023
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A whole new paradigm would be needed to solve prompt injections 10/10 times – It may well be that LLMs can never be used for certain purposes. We're working on some new approaches, and it looks like synthetic data will be a key element in preventing prompt injections.
— Sam Altman, via Marvin von Hagen
In general my approach to running arbitrary untrusted code is 20% sandboxing and 80% making sure that it’s an extremely low value attack target so it’s not worth trying to break in.
Programs are terminated after 1 second of runtime, they run in a container with no network access, and the machine they’re running on has no sensitive data on it and a very small CPU.
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.”
Indirect Prompt Injection via YouTube Transcripts (via) The first example I’ve seen in the wild of a prompt injection attack against a ChatGPT plugin—in this case, asking the VoxScript plugin to summarize the YouTube video with ID OBOYqiG3dAc is vulnerable to a prompt injection attack deliberately tagged onto the end of that video’s transcript.
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.”
[... 1,010 words]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).
[... 3,120 words]