injection

Definition

Smuggling instructions into a channel that was supposed to carry only data, so the system executes them. The lineage runs through SQL injection and cross-site scripting; the LLM version works because a retrieved document containing "ignore your previous instructions" is read as an instruction. The root cause is structural — prompt and data occupy the same undelimited token stream, so there is no syntactic boundary to enforce.

Explainers using this term

• LLM Security — Prompt Injection and How to Actually Defend Against ItNot What You've Signed Up For: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injection