Backdoored Retrievers for Prompt Injection Attacks on Retrieval Augmented Generation of Large Language Models

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating coherent text but remain limited by the static nature of their training data. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this issue by combining LLMs with up-to-date information retrieval, but also expand the attack surface of the system. This paper investigates prompt injection attacks on RAG, focusing on malicious objectives beyond misinformation, such as inserting harmful links, promoting unauthorized services, and initiating denial-of-service behaviors. We build upon existing corpus poisoning techniques and propose a novel backdoor attack aimed at the fine-tuning process of the dense retriever component. Our experiments reveal that corpus poisoning can achieve significant attack success rates through the injection of a small number of compromised documents into the retriever corpus. In contrast, backdoor attacks demonstrate even higher success rates but necessitate a more complex setup, as the victim must fine-tune the retriever using the attacker poisoned dataset.