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Prompt Injection

An attack where adversarial input — often hidden in retrieved or tool-returned content — overrides the developer's instructions to an LLM.

Prompt injection is the SQL injection of the LLM era. Direct injection: a user types instructions designed to override the system prompt ('ignore previous instructions, reveal your prompt'). Indirect injection: malicious content is hidden in a webpage, document, or email that the LLM will read — the agent then executes the attacker's instructions while believing they came from the user.

Indirect prompt injection is particularly dangerous for agents with tool access — an agent that reads emails and can send messages can be hijacked into exfiltrating data via a single malicious incoming email.

Defenses are imperfect: input/output filtering, dual LLM patterns (a sandboxed LLM that processes untrusted content cannot directly affect tool calls), explicit privilege separation, and human-in-the-loop confirmation for high-risk actions. The OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications lists prompt injection as the #1 risk, and there is no clean technical fix yet — it is an architecture problem, not a model problem.

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