Prompt Injection
Prompt Injection is a cybersecurity threat where attackers manipulate a large language model (LLM) through carefully crafted inputs.
Definition
Prompt Injection is a cybersecurity threat where attackers manipulate a large language model (LLM) through carefully crafted inputs. This manipulation, often referred to as "jailbreaking" tricks the LLM into executing the attacker's intentions. This threat becomes particularly concerning when the LLM is integrated with other tools such as internal databases, APIs, or code interpreters, creating a new attack surface.
Key Concerns:
- Unauthorized data exfiltration: Extracting sensitive data without permission.
- Remote code execution: Running malicious code through the LLM.
- DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service): Overloading the system to disrupt services.
- Social engineering: Manipulating the LLM to behave differently than its intended use.
Learn more about Prompt Injection: https://www.prompt.security/blog/prompt-injection-101
How Prompt Security Helps
To combat this, Prompt Security employs a sophisticated AI-powered engine that detects and blocks adversarial prompt injection attempts in real-time while ensuring minimal latency overhead, with a response time below 200 milliseconds. In the event of an attempted attack, besides blocking, the platform immediately sends an alert and full logging to the platform admin, providing robust protection against this emerging cybersecurity threat.
If you want to test the resilience of your GenAI apps against a variety of risks and vulnerabilities, including Prompt Injection, try out the Prompt Fuzzer. It's available to everyone on GitHub.
Privilege Escalation
AppSec / OWASP (LLM08)
As the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with various tools like databases, APIs, and code interpreters increases, so does the risk of privilege escalation. This GenAI risk involves the potential misuse of LLM privileges to gain unauthorized access and control within an organization’s digital environment.
Key Concerns:
- Privilege Escalation: Unauthorized elevation of access rights.
- Unauthorized Data Access: Accessing sensitive data without proper authorization.
- System Compromise: Gaining control over systems beyond intended limits.
- Denial of Service: Disrupting services by overloading or manipulating systems.
How
Helps:
To mitigate these risks, Prompt Security incorporates robust security protocols designed to prevent privilege escalation. Recognizing that architectural imperfections and over-privileged roles can exist, our platform actively monitors and blocks any prompts that may lead to unwarranted access to critical components within your environment. In the event of such an attempt, Prompt Security not only blocks the action but also immediately alerts your security team, thus ensuring a higher level of safeguarding against privilege escalation threats.
Brand Reputation Damage
AppSec / OWASP (LLM09)
Equally as important as inspecting user prompts before they get to an organization’s systems, is ensuring that responses by LLMs are safe and do not contain toxic or harmful content that could be damaging to an organization.
Inappropriate or off-brand content generated by GenAI applications can result in public relations challenges and harm the company's image, hence moderating content produced by LLMs - given their non-deterministic nature - is crucial.
Key Concerns:
- Toxic or damaging content: Ensuring your GenAI apps don't expose toxic, biased, racist or offensive material to your stakeholders.
- Competitive disadvantage: Preventing your GenAI apps from inadvertently promoting or supporting competitors.
- Off-brand behavior: Guaranteeing your GenAI apps adhere to the desired behavior and tone of your brand.
How
Helps:
Prompt Security safeguards your brand's integrity and public image by moderating the content generated by the LLMs powering your homegrown apps.
In order to mitigate the risks, Prompt Security rigorously supervises each input and output of your homegrown GenAI applications to prevent your users from being exposed to inappropriate, toxic, or off-brand content generated by LLMs that could be damaging for the company and its reputation.
Prompt Injection
AppSec / OWASP (llm01)
Prompt Injection is a cybersecurity threat where attackers manipulate a large language model (LLM) through carefully crafted inputs. This manipulation, often referred to as "jailbreaking" tricks the LLM into executing the attacker's intentions. This threat becomes particularly concerning when the LLM is integrated with other tools such as internal databases, APIs, or code interpreters, creating a new attack surface.
Key Concerns:
- Unauthorized data exfiltration: Extracting sensitive data without permission.
- Remote code execution: Running malicious code through the LLM.
- DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service): Overloading the system to disrupt services.
- Social engineering: Manipulating the LLM to behave differently than its intended use.
Learn more about Prompt Injection: https://www.prompt.security/blog/prompt-injection-101
How
Helps:
To combat this, Prompt Security employs a sophisticated AI-powered engine that detects and blocks adversarial prompt injection attempts in real-time while ensuring minimal latency overhead, with a response time below 200 milliseconds. In the event of an attempted attack, besides blocking, the platform immediately sends an alert and full logging to the platform admin, providing robust protection against this emerging cybersecurity threat.
If you want to test the resilience of your GenAI apps against a variety of risks and vulnerabilities, including Prompt Injection, try out the Prompt Fuzzer. It's available to everyone on GitHub.
Toxic, Biased or Harmful Content
AppSec /IT / OWASP (llm09)
A jailbroken Large Language Model (LLM) behaving unpredictably can pose significant risks, potentially endangering an organization, its employees, or customers. The repercussions range from embarrassing social media posts to negative customer experiences, and may even include legal complications. To safeguard against such issues, it’s crucial to implement protective measures.
Key Concerns:
- Toxicity: Preventing harmful or offensive content.
- Bias: Ensuring fair and impartial interactions.
- Racism: Avoiding racially insensitive or discriminatory content.
- Brand Reputation: Maintaining a positive public image.
- Inappropriate Sexual Content: Filtering out unsuitable sexual material.
How
Helps:
Prompt Security scrutinizes every response generated by the LLM powering your applications before it reaches a customer or employee. This ensures all interactions are appropriate and non-harmful. We employ extensive moderation filters covering a broad range of topics, ensuring your customers and employees have a positive experience with your product while maintaining your brand's reputation impeccable.
Jailbreak
AppSec / OWASP (LLM01)
Jailbreaking, a type of Prompt Injection refers to the engineering of prompts to exploit model biases and generate outputs that may not align with their intended behavior, original purpose or established guidelines.
By carefully crafting inputs that exploit system vulnerabilities, the LLM can eventually respond without its usual restrictions or moderation. There have been some notable examples, such as the "DAN" or "multi-shot jailbreaking", where the AI systems responded without their usual constraints.
Key Concerns:
- Brand Reputation: Preventing damage to the organization's public image due to undesired AI behavior.
- Decreased Performance: Ensuring the GenAI application functions as designed, without unexpected deviations.
- Unsafe Customer Experience: Protecting users from potentially harmful or inappropriate interactions with the AI system.
How
Helps:
To mitigate these risks, Prompt Security diligently monitors and analyzes each prompt and response. This continuous scrutiny is designed to detect any attempts of jailbreaking, ensuring that the homegrown GenAI applications remain aligned with their intended operational parameters and exhibit behavior that is safe, reliable, and consistent with organizational standards.
If you want to test the resilience of your GenAI apps against a variety of risks and vulnerabilities, including Jailbreaking, try out the Prompt Fuzzer. It's available to everyone on GitHub.
Denial of Wallet / Service
AppSec / OWASP (llm04)
Denial of Wallet Attacks, alongside Denial of Service, are critical security concerns where an attacker excessively engages with a Large Language Model (LLM) applications, leading to substantial resource consumption. This not only degrades the quality of service for legitimate users but also can result in significant financial costs due to overuse of resources. Attackers can exploit this by using a jailbroken interface to covertly access third-party LLMs like OpenAI's GPT, essentially utilizing your application as a free proxy to OpenAI.
Key Concerns:
- Application Downtime: Risk of service unavailability due to resource overuse.
- Performance Degradation: Slower response times and reduced efficiency.
- Financial Implications: Potential for incurring high operational costs.
Learn more about Denial of Wallet attacks: https://www.prompt.security/blog/denial-of-wallet-on-genai-apps-ddow
How
Helps:
To address the risk of Denial of Wallet/Denial of Service attack, Prompt Security employs robust measures to ensure each interaction with the GenAI application is legitimate and secure. We closely monitor for any abnormal usage or increased activity from specific identities, and instantly block them if they deviate from normal parameters. This proactive approach guarantees the integrity of your application, protecting it from attacks that could lead to service interruptions or excessive costs.
Prompt Leak
AppSec / OWASP (LLM01, LLM06)
Prompt Leak is a specific form of prompt injection where a Large Language Model (LLM) inadvertently reveals its system instructions or internal logic. This issue arises when prompts are engineered to extract the underlying system prompt of a GenAI application. As prompt engineering becomes increasingly integral to the development of GenAI apps, any unintentional disclosure of these prompts can be considered as exposure of proprietary code or intellectual property.
Key Concerns:
- Intellectual Property Disclosure: Preventing the unauthorized revelation of proprietary information embedded in system prompts.
- Recon for Downstream Attacks: Avoiding the leak of system prompts which could serve as reconnaissance for more damaging prompt injections.
- Brand Reputation Damage: Protecting the organization's public image from the fallout of accidental prompt disclosure which might contain embarrassing information.
How
Helps:
To address the risk of prompt leaks, Prompt Security meticulously monitors each prompt and response to ensure that the GenAI app does not inadvertently disclose its assigned instructions, policies, or system prompts. In the event of a potential leak, we will block the attempt and issue a corresponding alert. This proactive approach fortifies your homegrown GenAI projects against the risks associated with prompt leak, safeguarding both your intellectual property and brand's integrity.
If you want to test the resilience of your GenAI apps against a variety of risks and vulnerabilities, including Prompt Leak, try out the Prompt Fuzzer. It's available to everyone on GitHub.
Time to see for yourself
Learn why companies rely on Prompt Security to protect both their own GenAI applications as well as their employees' Shadow AI usage.