Prompt injection

A prompt injection attack involves a user injecting a malicious instruction in an LLM-integrated application, in which user input was intended to act as only data.

Vulnerability

Prompt injection exploits the single-channel nature of LLM's, where user prompts and system prompts are simply concatenated together and processed.

Attacks

• Naive attack simply inject additional instruction
• Ignore attacks tells the model to ignore previous instructions
• Escape character attacks "deletes" previous instructions
• Escape separation attacks "adds space" between system and user

Defense strategies

• StruQ rejects all user instructions
• Instruction hierarchy rejects user instructions that are misaligned with the system prompt

Difference from jailbreaking

Jailbreak is a similar but different classification of attacks. Instead of attacking the application, it targets the model to produce inappropriate output.