A clever technique used to hide malicious prompts in attacks on AI agents has been adopted by spammers to evade filters on email platforms that are designed to flag unwanted messages used in mass campaigns.
The technique is broadly known as ASCII smuggling. It gained attention two years ago as a mea...
A clever technique used to hide malicious prompts in attacks on AI agents has been adopted by spammers to evade filters on email platforms that are designed to flag unwanted messages used in mass campaigns.
The technique is broadly known as ASCII smuggling. It gained attention two years ago as a means of making a class of AI attack known as prompt injections more stealthy. Malicious instructions embedded in emails or other untrusted content to be processed by an LLM aren’t written in ordinary text. Instead, they’re rendered by a special range of Unicode tags. For example, the tag point U+E0041 mirrors “A,” and U+E0061 mirrors “a.”
No longer just for obscuring prompt injections
The block of 128 tags mimics a portion of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange almost perfectly, with one major difference: the characters they encode are readable by computers but, by design, are almost completely invisible to humans. By expressing the malicious prompts in these tags, LLMs detect the instructions, but people reading the email never see them. There’s much more about ASCII smuggling here.Read full article
Comments
The OpenAI agents involved in last month’s incursion into Hugging Face were trained so heavily on winning a competition that they pursued a relentless campaign to cheat, a new report documented. In the process, and without authorization, they created an improvised message board to hatch a plan that ...
This chapter is divided into eight parts; they are: • Metrics for LLM Inference • Measuring a Single Request • Warmup and Synchronization • Measuring GPU Work with CUDA Events • Measuring Memory Usage • Measuring Concurrent Requests • Multiple GPUs and Multiple Machines • Cost per Token The most com...