Items tagged security in May, 2023
Filters: Year: 2023 × Month: May × security × Sorted by date
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 # 25th May 2023, 11:03 pm
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.
— Julia Evans # 25th May 2023, 8:12 pm
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
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. # 15th May 2023, 7:11 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.”
[... 1010 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).
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