TopoGuard: Graph Theory Based Defenses Against Split-Knowledge Attacks on RAG

arXiv:2607.20437v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Production Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems rely on aggregating multiple external documents to answer complex queries. However, the retrieved documents introduce a new threat surface that can be exploited to launch split-knowledge attacks. In this attack, the adversary injects documents that are individually benign but create false associations when combined and fed to language models. This paper shows that the new attack is structurally invisible to existing per-document filters, like LlamaGuard. To address this issue in RAG, this work introduces TopoGuard, a family of graph theory-based methods specifically targeting the split-knowledge attacks by building a semantic similarity graph from retrieved documents and detecting contexts with malicious topology. Grounded on the theoretical analysis, the TopoGuard family has been proven to be effective and robust even with noisy inputs. Extensive experiments are conducted on two retrieval datasets and compared with multiple baseline methods. Specifically, the TopoGuard-$\lambda_2$+Entity catches 21$\times$ more attacks than LlamaGuard-2-8B at 1\% FPR (32.6\% vs 1.5\% recall) on the HotpotQA dataset. Compared with production RAG detection systems using large language models, the proposed TopoGuard variants run efficiently at sub-millisecond latency and stay robust under adaptive adversaries and benign cross-domain queries.

Abstract:Production Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems rely on aggregating multiple external documents to answer complex queries. However, the retrieved documents introduce a new threat surface that can be exploited to launch split-knowledge attacks. In this attack, the adversary injects documents that are individually benign but create false associations when combined and fed to language models. This paper shows that the new attack is structurally invisible to existing per-document filters, like LlamaGuard. To address this issue in RAG, this work introduces TopoGuard, a family of graph theory-based methods specifically targeting the split-knowledge attacks by building a semantic similarity graph from retrieved documents and detecting contexts with malicious topology. Grounded on the theoretical analysis, the TopoGuard family has been proven to be effective and robust even with noisy inputs. Extensive experiments are conducted on two retrieval datasets and compared with multiple baseline methods. Specifically, the TopoGuard-$\lambda_2$+Entity catches 21$\times$ more attacks than LlamaGuard-2-8B at 1\% FPR (32.6\% vs 1.5\% recall) on the HotpotQA dataset. Compared with production RAG detection systems using large language models, the proposed TopoGuard variants run efficiently at sub-millisecond latency and stay robust under adaptive adversaries and benign cross-domain queries.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

arXiv:2607.20437 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2607.20437v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.20437 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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TopoGuard: Graph Theory Based Defenses Against Split-Knowledge Attacks on RAG

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