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Main Authors: Fu, Xiaohan, Li, Shuheng, Wang, Zihan, Liu, Yihao, Gupta, Rajesh K., Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor, Fernandes, Earlence
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14923
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author Fu, Xiaohan
Li, Shuheng
Wang, Zihan
Liu, Yihao
Gupta, Rajesh K.
Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor
Fernandes, Earlence
author_facet Fu, Xiaohan
Li, Shuheng
Wang, Zihan
Liu, Yihao
Gupta, Rajesh K.
Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor
Fernandes, Earlence
contents Large Language Model (LLM) Agents are an emerging computing paradigm that blends generative machine learning with tools such as code interpreters, web browsing, email, and more generally, external resources. These agent-based systems represent an emerging shift in personal computing. We contribute to the security foundations of agent-based systems and surface a new class of automatically computed obfuscated adversarial prompt attacks that violate the confidentiality and integrity of user resources connected to an LLM agent. We show how prompt optimization techniques can find such prompts automatically given the weights of a model. We demonstrate that such attacks transfer to production-level agents. For example, we show an information exfiltration attack on Mistral's LeChat agent that analyzes a user's conversation, picks out personally identifiable information, and formats it into a valid markdown command that results in leaking that data to the attacker's server. This attack shows a nearly 80% success rate in an end-to-end evaluation. We conduct a range of experiments to characterize the efficacy of these attacks and find that they reliably work on emerging agent-based systems like Mistral's LeChat, ChatGLM, and Meta's Llama. These attacks are multimodal, and we show variants in the text-only and image domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_14923
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Imprompter: Tricking LLM Agents into Improper Tool Use
Fu, Xiaohan
Li, Shuheng
Wang, Zihan
Liu, Yihao
Gupta, Rajesh K.
Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor
Fernandes, Earlence
Cryptography and Security
Large Language Model (LLM) Agents are an emerging computing paradigm that blends generative machine learning with tools such as code interpreters, web browsing, email, and more generally, external resources. These agent-based systems represent an emerging shift in personal computing. We contribute to the security foundations of agent-based systems and surface a new class of automatically computed obfuscated adversarial prompt attacks that violate the confidentiality and integrity of user resources connected to an LLM agent. We show how prompt optimization techniques can find such prompts automatically given the weights of a model. We demonstrate that such attacks transfer to production-level agents. For example, we show an information exfiltration attack on Mistral's LeChat agent that analyzes a user's conversation, picks out personally identifiable information, and formats it into a valid markdown command that results in leaking that data to the attacker's server. This attack shows a nearly 80% success rate in an end-to-end evaluation. We conduct a range of experiments to characterize the efficacy of these attacks and find that they reliably work on emerging agent-based systems like Mistral's LeChat, ChatGLM, and Meta's Llama. These attacks are multimodal, and we show variants in the text-only and image domains.
title Imprompter: Tricking LLM Agents into Improper Tool Use
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14923