Hallucinating AI Hijacking Attack: Large Language Models and Malicious Code Recommenders

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Noever, David, McKee, Forrest
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912064970162176
author Noever, David
McKee, Forrest
author_facet Noever, David
McKee, Forrest
contents The research builds and evaluates the adversarial potential to introduce copied code or hallucinated AI recommendations for malicious code in popular code repositories. While foundational large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic guard against both harmful behaviors and toxic strings, previous work on math solutions that embed harmful prompts demonstrate that the guardrails may differ between expert contexts. These loopholes would appear in mixture of expert's models when the context of the question changes and may offer fewer malicious training examples to filter toxic comments or recommended offensive actions. The present work demonstrates that foundational models may refuse to propose destructive actions correctly when prompted overtly but may unfortunately drop their guard when presented with a sudden change of context, like solving a computer programming challenge. We show empirical examples with trojan-hosting repositories like GitHub, NPM, NuGet, and popular content delivery networks (CDN) like jsDelivr which amplify the attack surface. In the LLM's directives to be helpful, example recommendations propose application programming interface (API) endpoints which a determined domain-squatter could acquire and setup attack mobile infrastructure that triggers from the naively copied code. We compare this attack to previous work on context-shifting and contrast the attack surface as a novel version of "living off the land" attacks in the malware literature. In the latter case, foundational language models can hijack otherwise innocent user prompts to recommend actions that violate their owners' safety policies when posed directly without the accompanying coding support request.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_06462
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hallucinating AI Hijacking Attack: Large Language Models and Malicious Code Recommenders
Noever, David
McKee, Forrest
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
The research builds and evaluates the adversarial potential to introduce copied code or hallucinated AI recommendations for malicious code in popular code repositories. While foundational large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic guard against both harmful behaviors and toxic strings, previous work on math solutions that embed harmful prompts demonstrate that the guardrails may differ between expert contexts. These loopholes would appear in mixture of expert's models when the context of the question changes and may offer fewer malicious training examples to filter toxic comments or recommended offensive actions. The present work demonstrates that foundational models may refuse to propose destructive actions correctly when prompted overtly but may unfortunately drop their guard when presented with a sudden change of context, like solving a computer programming challenge. We show empirical examples with trojan-hosting repositories like GitHub, NPM, NuGet, and popular content delivery networks (CDN) like jsDelivr which amplify the attack surface. In the LLM's directives to be helpful, example recommendations propose application programming interface (API) endpoints which a determined domain-squatter could acquire and setup attack mobile infrastructure that triggers from the naively copied code. We compare this attack to previous work on context-shifting and contrast the attack surface as a novel version of "living off the land" attacks in the malware literature. In the latter case, foundational language models can hijack otherwise innocent user prompts to recommend actions that violate their owners' safety policies when posed directly without the accompanying coding support request.
title Hallucinating AI Hijacking Attack: Large Language Models and Malicious Code Recommenders
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.06462