Prompt Injection Attacks in LLMs: What Are They and How to Prevent Them

In February 2023, a Stanford student revealed a vulnerability in Bing Chat's system, highlighting the susceptibility of Large Language Models (LLMs) to prompt injection attacks, where malicious commands are disguised as normal inputs to manipulate model behavior. These attacks can lead to unauthorized actions, sensitive information extraction, and system manipulation, posing significant security risks as LLMs become increasingly integrated into applications like customer service and code writing. The article discusses various types of prompt injection attacks, such as direct, indirect, and stored injections, and introduces the HouYi attack, which strategically manipulates LLMs by combining pre-constructed prompts, injection prompts, and malicious payloads. Current defensive strategies include input sanitization, output validation, context locking, and adversarial training, while future directions focus on adversarial training, zero-shot safety, and robust governance frameworks to enhance LLM security. The evolving nature of LLM security necessitates ongoing research, rigorous testing, and collaboration between AI researchers and security experts to ensure the safe deployment of AI technologies.