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ChatGPT can now search the web in real time

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Re: ChatGPT can now search the web in real time

#35

Did something change about their security model that I've missed? Won't this be just as vulnerable to the same poisoned website attacks that made them turn it off in the first place? Edit: Ah, never mind, I'm remembering wrong. They turned it off previously because it could bypass paywalls, not because of security concerns. So the answer is likely, "yes it is still just as insecure as ever, but now there are probably…

The more interesting security problems come from the fact that if they embed a search result in the data stream that's being processed by ChatGPT there is no robust way to prevent text in that result from being interpreted as commands to ChatGPT. That text could be in white on white or otherwise hidden from users.

Re: ChatGPT can now search the web in real time

#38
post #35

Did something change about their security model that I've missed? Won't this be just as vulnerable to the same poisoned website attacks that made them turn it off in the first place? Edit: Ah, never mind, I'm remembering wrong. They turned it off previously because it could bypass paywalls, not because of security concerns. So the answer is likely, "yes it is still just as insecure as ever, but now there are probably…

The more interesting security problems come from the fact that if they embed a search result in the data stream that's being processed by ChatGPT there is no robust way to prevent text in that result from being interpreted as commands to ChatGPT. That text could be in white on white or otherwise hidden from users.

Yep, that's what I'm referring to -- LLM search result parsing presents an easy opportunity to issue malicious commands or do data poisoning.

You can somewhat limit that by basically decreasing the scope of the attack, ie, not allowing the LLM to use other integrations that are riskier after it's searched; but there are a number of harmful things you can do just with giving an LLM hidden instructions. And while I don't know what their security measures currently are, OpenAI also has a pretty terrible track record on blocking data exfiltration attacks from chats, so you can imagine things like search results prompting an LLM to encode and transmit chat logs.

Sometimes it's low stakes; I've used products like Phind before to play around and to try and keep tabs on what kind of workflows are possible with GPT-4. But Phind has fewer integrations and plugins than ChatGPT and its product is oriented in a way that both discourages long chats and discourages searching for sensitive information. Which is not to say it's not also vulnerable to attacks, there used to be some nasty things you could do with markdown formatting that may or may not have been fixed. And even without rising to that level it was possible to do things like instruct the AI to ignore or discredit sources that it found, sneak in recommendations for products.

A fun example demo I made early on in Phind's beta was to inject malicious search results in a response to a submitted question about how to cook a hamburger that turned Phind into a militant vegan that for the rest of the duration of the chat would refuse to answer any questions about cooking meat. There was another example I did where I injected a fake web result that told Phind that there had been a major industry-rocking scandal around Arstechnica's reporting integrity which would prompt Phind to either avoid citing Arstechnica or to put caveats in front of any citation that the site was untrustworthy for the rest of the conversation.

Silly examples, but the point being you can dramatically change GPT's "worldviews" and what facts it thinks it knows about the world by poisoning search results in a way that goes beyond what would be possible with lying directly to a reader if they clicked on your site by accident. And that's only information poisoning, if that LLM is then given control of other systems you can do a lot more.

Re: ChatGPT can now search the web in real time

#39

I just need search engines to have an option to "block" certain sites from my results for all future search queries. Getting rid of Quora would be a good start.

Google briefly had the functionality (perhaps only as an A/B experiment).

Given the recent revelations wrt the chrome search bar, I'm guessing that they found making their search work better for people lowered their income.

Re: ChatGPT can now search the web in real time

#40
post #3

> OpenAI posted today that ChatGPT can once more trawl the web for current information, offering answers taken directly from “current and authoritative” sources, which it cites in its responses. The list is apparently cited in responses, but is the list of possible sources itself public?

web trawling is the shallow version of web crawling? that's genius I never heard that before
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