LLM Prompt Obfuscation

Adversaries may hide or otherwise obfuscate prompt injections or retrieval content to avoid detection from humans, large language model (LLM) guardrails, or other detection mechanisms.

Text inputs may be obfuscated by modifying how the instructions are rendered, such as small font, text colored the same as the background, or hidden HTML elements. Similarly, approaches for other modalities include low-contrast or tiny text placed inside an image, text overlaid on a busy or camouflaging background, instructions spoken faintly or sped up in audio, or text shown briefly in a single video frame.

Inputs can also be obscured via an encoding scheme such as base64 or rot13. This may bypass LLM guardrails that identify malicious content and may not be as easily identifiable as malicious to a human in the loop.