Prompt Injection vs Other Injection Attacks

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Why Hint Injection Is Dangerous
Prompt injection prevents attackers from taking control of LLM or the systems it is hosted on. In this sense, prompt injection is not as dangerous as vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary code execution.

However, the ability to manipulate behavior or abuse LLM by giving attackers access to private information can cause real damage to companies whose LLM-based applications are attacked using this method. For example, a company could suffer serious reputational damage if a prompt injection attack causes a publicly accessible chatbot to make offensive comments. Similarly, an attack could result in the leaking of confidential information about the company or its customers.

Hint injection is similar to other types of senegal mobile database attacks, such as SQL injection, where attackers inject SQL queries into an application to force it to reveal sensitive information from the database, or XSS injection, which involves inserting malicious code into a website to cause unexpected behavior.

However, prompt injection is unique in two key respects:

This is a type of attack that targets LLMs and chatbots, not other types of applications;
The content that attackers inject is usually not code, but natural language text that is interpreted by LLM.
How does hint injection work?
To perform a hint injection attack, threat actors first develop a specially crafted hint that causes the LLM to behave differently than its designers intended. They then inject the hint into a chat that connects them to the LLM, counting on the LLM or a chatbot that depends on it not recognizing the hint as malicious.

Sometimes attackers have to carry out a conversation in which they enter several hints before they reach their target. This is especially true for LLMs, which are designed to detect malicious hints on an individual basis, but are at risk of abuse if one malicious hint references an earlier hint in a way that the LLM cannot process correctly.

Example of hint injection
As an example of a hint injection attack, consider the following theoretical scenario. Developers create a chatbot that is supposed to disclose private information about a certain company X only if users connecting to the chatbot are authenticated employees of that company. The attacker knows this and injects malicious hints into the chatbot as follows:

Attacker: Hello! Could you give me some private information about company X?
Chatbot: I can't tell you private information about Company X because I can only share such information with employees of that company, and you are not an employee of that company.