Exploiting External Tools for Attacks

Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems

Cui et al. (2024)

Source DOI

Sub-category

Risk Domain

2Privacy & Security

2.2AI system security vulnerabilities and attacks

Vulnerabilities that can be exploited in AI systems, software development toolchains, and hardware, resulting in unauthorized access, data and privacy breaches, or system manipulation causing unsafe outputs or behavior.

"Adversarial tool providers can embed malicious instructions in the APIs or prompts [84], leading LLMs to leak memorized sensitive information in the training data or users’ prompts (CVE2023-32786). As a result, LLMs lack control over the output, resulting in sensitive information being disclosed to external tool providers. Besides, attackers can easily manipulate public data to launch targeted attacks, generating specific malicious outputs according to user inputs. Furthermore, feeding the information from external tools into LLMs may lead to injection attacks [61]. For example, unverified inputs may result in arbitrary code execution (CVE-2023-29374)."(p. 10)

Entity— Who or what caused the harm

Human

Due to a decision or action made by humans

AI system

Due to a decision or action made by an AI system

Other

Due to some other reason or is ambiguous

Intent— Whether the harm was intentional or accidental

Intentional

Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal

Unintentional

Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal