梳理大模型代理的隐私风险,聚焦其接触的数据源与泄露路径。
Agents That Know Too Much: A Data-Centric Survey of Privacy in LLM Agents
- 从数据视角分类代理触达的数据源及对应隐私风险
- 发现信息流控制是唯一覆盖跨会话与组合推理泄露的治理机制
- 现有基准无法统一测试代理在多数据面下的隐私表现
大语言模型代理越来越多地查询数据库、搜索文档集合、调用外部API、记忆过往交互,并代表用户执行操作。随着其从回答问题转向处理敏感数据,隐私保护愈发困难。代理会触及多种数据源,执行多步工作流,跨会话保持状态,并拥有委托权限。因此,敏感信息不仅可能通过最终回答泄露,还可能通过所发出的查询、处理的中间结果、写入的记忆以及与其他代理交换的消息泄露。本文从数据中心视角系统调研LLM代理的隐私问题,将研究对象定义为与数据交互的代理(data agent)。当前相关研究分散于检索增强生成、文本转SQL接口、代理记忆、提示注入、访问控制和上下文隐私等领域。本综述整合这些工作:对代理接触的数据源进行分类,识别每类数据带来的隐私风险,归纳相应的治理机制;梳理现有评估基准,指出缺失之处;并提出开放问题。两个核心发现为:在治理机制中,仅信息流控制能同时应对组合推理和跨会话推理泄露这两类最薄弱环节;目前尚无基准能在单一隐私策略下,全面测试代理在所有数据表面的行为。目标是构建一个统合零散文献的参考框架,为未来研究提供共同语境。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language model agents increasingly query databases, search document collections, call external APIs, remember past interactions, and act on a user's behalf. As they move from answering questions to operating over sensitive data, privacy becomes harder to enforce. An agent touches many data sources, runs multi-step workflows, keeps state across sessions, and acts with delegated permissions. Sensitive information can therefore leak not only through its final answer but through the queries it issues, the intermediate results it handles, the memory it writes, and the messages it exchanges with other agents. We survey the privacy of LLM agents from a data-centric view, organizing the field around the data an agent touches rather than by attack type, and we use data agent as shorthand for an LLM agent that works with data. Research on these risks is active but scattered across retrieval-augmented generation, text-to-SQL interfaces, agent memory, prompt injection, access control, and contextual privacy. This survey brings that work together: we taxonomize the data sources an agent touches, the privacy risks each source creates, and the governance mechanisms that address them; we map the benchmarks used to measure these risks and identify what is missing; and we set out the open problems. Two findings recur: among governance mechanisms only information-flow control covers both compositional and cross-session inference leakage, the two least-protected risks; and no benchmark drives an agent across its data surfaces under one privacy policy, the instrument the field most lacks. Our goal is a reference that situates the scattered literature and gives future work a common framing.
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