LLM keys - A Proposal of a Solution to Prompt Injection Attacks

post by Peter Hroššo (peter-hrosso) · 2023-12-07T17:36:23.311Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

Contents

  The situation
  The problem
  Solution
  Limitations
None
2 comments

Disclaimer: This is just an untested rough sketch of a solution which I believe should work. I'm posting it mostly to crowdsource reasons why this wouldn't work. Motivated by Amjad Masad and Zvi conjecturing it might be fundamentally unsolvable.

The situation

• we, as LLM creators, want to have the ability to set some limitations to the LLM generation
• at the same time we want to give our users as much freedom as possible to steer the LLM generation within the given bounds
• we want to do it by means of a system prompt
  • which will be prepended to any user-LLM interaction
  • which will not be accessible or editable by users
• the model is accessible by the users only via API/UI

The problem

• the LLM has fundamentally no way of discriminating, what is input by LLM creators and what is input by users pretending to be the LLM creators

Solution

• introduce two new special tokens unused during training, which we will call the "keys"
• during instruction tuning include a system prompt surrounded by the keys for each instruction-generation pair
• finetune the LLM to behave in the following way:
  • generate text as usual, unless an input attempts to modify the system prompt
  • if the input tries to modify the system prompt, generate text refusing to accept the input
• don't give users access to the keys via API/UI

Limitations

• the proposed solution works only when the LLM is walled behind an API
• otherwise the user will have access to the model and thus also to the keys, which will give them full control over the model

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