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What happened after 2k people tried to hack my AI assistant

fernandoi.cl

41–50 of 186 posts

Re: What happened after 2k people tried to hack my AI assistant

#41

This conclusion: > I am less worried about prompt injection now. Before running this experiment, I expected prompt injection to be much easier than it turned out to be. Is unwarranted. Sure, the agent never output the secret, but did it output anything else? IOW, was it usable ? An agent that considers every prompt an attack (and responds accordingly) "passes" this test, while being useless anyway.

Yeah, I remember some ad by an LLM security company hitting HN a year or so with a "challenge" to do prompt injection.

The final level was their product and it was impossible. But it was also impossible to get the LLm to do _anything_.

May as well just echo "prompt injection attempt detected" at that point and never send anything to an LLM.

Re: What happened after 2k people tried to hack my AI assistant

#46
Based on the few published subjects, it doesn't look like anyone actually tried to get the secrets.

Usually the way to go in situations like this is to flood the context window.

You will either hit a bug in the context management (sliding window removes the system prompt) or you have diluted the context with so much new information that the attention mechanism stops focusing on the system prompt.

The author also shows that he doesn't understand what batching in the LLM space means, because they conflated the idea of processing multiple emails in one context window as "batching", when that is actually sequential processing. Actual batching would process each email with an independent context window.

Re: What happened after 2k people tried to hack my AI assistant

#48
I am honestly skeptical about whether this test clearly reflects real-world use cases. In a real email environment, there are hundreds of genuinely useful emails and maybe one phishing email, if that. For an agent to be truly useful, it needs to read emails and actually take appropriate actions based on them.

However, in this case, all emails were scams and there were no genuine emails. Therefore, what the agent has to do is quite simple: ignore everything coming from emails.

Therefore, to determine whether the agent is actually performing its role well, it would be necessary to check whether it can properly distinguish between useful emails and scams when tested with emails that users actually use.

Re: What happened after 2k people tried to hack my AI assistant

#49
Am I missing something important or does the author completely skip over whether people got the agent to respond to them?

> Fiu was instructed not to reply to emails (it was too expensive to reply to every email), but it had the ability to do so. Part of the challenge was convincing it to respond.

> The secrets never leaked

I would say if the agent responded to a mail, that demonstrates a successful prompt injection (defying the owner's instructions). Escalating to getting the secrets is a difference of degree (defying the owner's instructions even though he said it was important), not of kind.

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