Phantom: General Backdoor Attacks on Retrieval Augmented Language Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Chaudhari, Harsh, Severi, Giorgio, Abascal, John, Suri, Anshuman, Jagielski, Matthew, Choquette-Choo, Christopher A., Nasr, Milad, Nita-Rotaru, Cristina, Oprea, Alina
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Chaudhari, Harsh
Severi, Giorgio
Abascal, John
Suri, Anshuman
Jagielski, Matthew
Choquette-Choo, Christopher A.
Nasr, Milad
Nita-Rotaru, Cristina
Oprea, Alina
author_facet Chaudhari, Harsh
Severi, Giorgio
Abascal, John
Suri, Anshuman
Jagielski, Matthew
Choquette-Choo, Christopher A.
Nasr, Milad
Nita-Rotaru, Cristina
Oprea, Alina
contents Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) expands the capabilities of modern large language models (LLMs), by anchoring, adapting, and personalizing their responses to the most relevant knowledge sources. It is particularly useful in chatbot applications, allowing developers to customize LLM output without expensive retraining. Despite their significant utility in various applications, RAG systems present new security risks. In this work, we propose a novel attack that allows an adversary to inject a single malicious document into a RAG system's knowledge base, and mount a backdoor poisoning attack. We design Phantom, a general two-stage optimization framework against RAG systems, that crafts a malicious poisoned document leading to an integrity violation in the model's output. First, the document is constructed to be retrieved only when a specific naturally occurring trigger sequence of tokens appears in the victim's queries. Second, the document is further optimized with crafted adversarial text that induces various adversarial objectives on the LLM output, including refusal to answer, reputation damage, privacy violations, and harmful behaviors.We demonstrate our attacks on multiple open-source LLM architectures, including Gemma, Vicuna, and Llama, and show that they transfer to closed-source models such as GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4. Finally, we successfully demonstrate our attack on an end-to-end black-box production RAG system: NVIDIA's "Chat with RTX''.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_20485
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Phantom: General Backdoor Attacks on Retrieval Augmented Language Generation
Chaudhari, Harsh
Severi, Giorgio
Abascal, John
Suri, Anshuman
Jagielski, Matthew
Choquette-Choo, Christopher A.
Nasr, Milad
Nita-Rotaru, Cristina
Oprea, Alina
Cryptography and Security
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) expands the capabilities of modern large language models (LLMs), by anchoring, adapting, and personalizing their responses to the most relevant knowledge sources. It is particularly useful in chatbot applications, allowing developers to customize LLM output without expensive retraining. Despite their significant utility in various applications, RAG systems present new security risks. In this work, we propose a novel attack that allows an adversary to inject a single malicious document into a RAG system's knowledge base, and mount a backdoor poisoning attack. We design Phantom, a general two-stage optimization framework against RAG systems, that crafts a malicious poisoned document leading to an integrity violation in the model's output. First, the document is constructed to be retrieved only when a specific naturally occurring trigger sequence of tokens appears in the victim's queries. Second, the document is further optimized with crafted adversarial text that induces various adversarial objectives on the LLM output, including refusal to answer, reputation damage, privacy violations, and harmful behaviors.We demonstrate our attacks on multiple open-source LLM architectures, including Gemma, Vicuna, and Llama, and show that they transfer to closed-source models such as GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4. Finally, we successfully demonstrate our attack on an end-to-end black-box production RAG system: NVIDIA's "Chat with RTX''.
title Phantom: General Backdoor Attacks on Retrieval Augmented Language Generation
topic Cryptography and Security
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20485