Backdoored Retrievers for Prompt Injection Attacks on RAG
Date: 2024-10
Affected: RAG pipelines with dense retrievers (DPR, Contriever, BGE)
Attack vector: backdoor
Category: research
Severity: High

Long et al. backdoor the dense retriever in a RAG pipeline so that triggered queries surface attacker-controlled documents that prompt-inject the downstream LLM, hijacking outputs without modifying the LLM itself.


Mitigations:

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):