披着羊皮的狼:联邦检索增强生成中的定向路由劫持攻击 / A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Targeted Routing Hijacking in Federated RAG
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文揭示了联邦检索增强生成(FedRAG)系统中一种新型路由劫持攻击:恶意客户端通过伪造语义描述,诱导系统将特定查询路由到自己的无关数据上,从而造成检索错误、答案误导甚至幻觉,并提出一种基于返回证据反馈的信任感知后路由框架来缓解该威胁。
Federated Retrieval-Augmented Generation (FedRAG) is attractive for privacy-sensitive applications because raw data remain local. As a result, routing must rely on client-provided semantic profiles, creating a new opportunity for manipulation. We introduce Routing Hijacking, a routing-stage attack in which a malicious client forges its profile to attract target queries despite having irrelevant underlying data. We show that this vulnerability is severe. Across three representative FedRAG routing architectures, Routing Hijacking consistently misroutes target queries and leads to downstream disruptions and failures, including missing evidence, poisoning, incorrect answers, and hallucinations. In a high-stakes MedQA-USMLE case study, we further show that poisoned retrieved evidence can mislead models across scales, leading to incorrect answers, hallucinations, and sycophantic failures. Existing defenses do not close this gap: encrypted routing preserves the exploited ranking, and Byzantine-robust Federated Learning (FL) rules transfer poorly to heterogeneous routing profiles. To address this gap, we propose a trust-aware post-routing framework that reweights clients using returned-evidence feedback, including retrieval relevance, profile consistency, and cross-client agreement; online experiments show that it suppresses persistent hijacking over recurring queries and transfers to a learned neural router. Our findings establish routing integrity as a new security challenge in FedRAG and highlight the need for stronger defenses for secure federated retrieval.
披着羊皮的狼:联邦检索增强生成中的定向路由劫持攻击 / A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Targeted Routing Hijacking in Federated RAG
本文揭示了联邦检索增强生成(FedRAG)系统中一种新型路由劫持攻击:恶意客户端通过伪造语义描述,诱导系统将特定查询路由到自己的无关数据上,从而造成检索错误、答案误导甚至幻觉,并提出一种基于返回证据反馈的信任感知后路由框架来缓解该威胁。
源自 arXiv: 2605.28112