用知识图谱引导的智能爬虫,高效窃取RAG系统的私有知识库内容。
Connect the Dots: Knowledge Graph-Guided Crawler Attack on Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems
- 构建覆盖增益模型,动态规划高价值问题生成策略。
- 1000次查询内平均覆盖率达66.8%(最高84.4%),提升超44%。
- 适用于多种RAG架构,可隐蔽执行且支持新式检索技术。
窃取攻击持续威胁已部署机器学习系统的核心知识产权。检索增强生成(RAG)系统将攻击面扩展至包含专有文档、领域数据集等知识产权资产的知识库。已有研究显示多轮提问可逐步窃取语料内容,但现有方法多依赖启发式策略,常早期停滞。本文将RAG知识库窃取建模为自适应随机覆盖问题(ASCP),以最大化在查询预算下条件期望边际增益为目标。面对真实黑盒环境下的三大挑战——边际增益不可观测、自然语言动作空间过大、查询需隐蔽且跨架构有效——我们提出RAGCrawler:基于知识图谱的攻击者框架,通过维护全局状态估计覆盖率增益,调度高价值语义锚点,并生成非冗余自然语言查询。在四个语料和四种生成器上,使用BGE检索器,RAGCrawler在1000次查询内实现平均66.8%(最高84.4%)覆盖率,相对最强基线提升44.90%;达到70%覆盖率所需查询量平均减少4.03倍以上,并实现高达0.699答案相似度的代理重建。该攻击还可扩展至检索器切换及查询重写、多查询检索等新型RAG技术。结果凸显保护RAG知识资产的紧迫性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Stealing attacks pose a persistent threat to the intellectual property of deployed machine-learning systems. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) intensifies this risk by extending the attack surface beyond model weights to knowledge base that often contains IP-bearing assets such as proprietary runbooks, curated domain collections, or licensed documents. Recent work shows that multi-turn questioning can gradually steal corpus content from RAG systems, yet existing attacks are largely heuristic and often plateau early. We address this gap by formulating RAG knowledge-base stealing as an adaptive stochastic coverage problem (ASCP), where each query is a stochastic action and the goal is to maximize the conditional expected marginal gain (CMG) in corpus coverage under a query budget. Bridging ASCP to real-world black-box RAG knowledge-base stealing raises three challenges: CMG is unobservable, the natural-language action space is intractably large, and feasibility constraints require stealthy queries that remain effective under diverse architectures. We introduce RAGCrawler, a knowledge graph-guided attacker that maintains a global attacker-side state to estimate coverage gains, schedule high-value semantic anchors, and generate non-redundant natural queries. Across four corpora and four generators with BGE retriever, RAGCrawler achieves 66.8% average coverage (up to 84.4%) within 1,000 queries, improving coverage by 44.90% relative to the strongest baseline. It also reduces the queries needed to reach 70% coverage by at least 4.03x on average and enables surrogate reconstruction with answer similarity up to 0.699. Our attack is also scalable to retriever switching and newer RAG techniques like query rewriting and multi-query retrieval. These results highlight urgent needs to protect RAG knowledge assets.
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