现有防御被协同投毒攻击绕过,需改在检索时检测请求需求。
Coverage Is Not Containment: A Fundamental Limit of Admission-Time Defenses Against Coordinated Poisoning of Vector Retrieval
- 攻击者注入少量普通文档,协同包围目标查询,劫持检索结果。
- 真实管道下88%的问答被篡改,而准入防御几乎无效。
- 唯一有效信号是检索时的请求需求,必须在检索阶段检测。
检索增强生成(RAG)通过向量库检索文本片段并信任其为上下文来回答问题,因此任何能添加文档的人都可能操控答案。近期一种有吸引力的防御策略在文档入库时过滤污染,拒绝表现如枢纽的文档。我们证明该策略——以及所有入库时的过滤机制——会被协同攻击者突破:攻击者注入少数看似无害的文档,共同包围目标查询,在BGE-large/BEIR上使10个文档全部进入前k位;在实时HNSW索引中达9.9/10。此攻击在真实流程中实现(使用BGE-large + HNSW + Qwen2.5-7B),使生成器在88%的测试中输出攻击者预设主张,无注入时为0%。任何准入防御均无效:攻击锥体在几何上与合法小众上传无法区分,最强分类器仅靠特征与数千样本,准确率接近随机,误报率1%时仅捕获4.2%攻击。我们证明此类准入统计的普遍局限性,并在两个语料库、五种编码器上复现并恶化。唯一可区分的信号是查询需求,但该信号在检索前不可见——这也提供了出路:在检索阶段观察需求的检测器可在1%误报率下100%捕获攻击。入库门的覆盖率不等于对协同投毒的控制力;鲁棒防御必须越过入口,转向需求监测。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) answers a question by retrieving passages from a vector store and trusting them as context, so anyone who can add documents can try to steer the answer. A recent, appealing defense filters poisoning at ingestion, rejecting any document that behaves like a hub. We show it -- and every ingestion-time filter -- is defeated by a coordinated adversary that injects a handful of individually unremarkable documents which together surround one target query and seize its top-k (on BGE-large / BEIR, m=10 documents take 10/10; 9.9/10 on a live HNSW index). The attack is not theoretical. Realized as ordinary fluent text and run end-to-end through a BGE-large + HNSW + Qwen2.5-7B pipeline, it makes the generator emit the attacker's planted claim in 88% of targets, versus 0% without the injection. And no admission-time defense stops it: at ingestion an attack cone is geometrically identical to a legitimate niche upload, so -- measuring this directly -- the strongest trained classifier, given every feature and thousands of examples, separates the two no better than chance, catching 4.2% of attacks at a 1% false-positive rate. We prove this limit for the entire class of ingestion-time statistics (any decision from documents and reference queries alone), and it reproduces -- and worsens -- across two corpora and five encoders. The one signal that separates an attack from legitimate niche ingestion -- a query's demand -- is invisible before retrieval, which is also the escape: a retrieval-time detector that observes demand catches 100% of the attacks at the same 1% false-positive rate. Coverage of the query space by an admission gate is not containment of coordinated poisoning; robust defense must move past the front door, to demand.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。