VectorSmuggle: Steganographic Exfiltration in Embedding Stores and a Cryptographic Provenance Defense
Modern retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems convert sensitive content into high-dimensional embeddings and store them in vector databases that treat the resulting numerical artifacts as opaque. Major vector-store products do not provide native controls for embedding integrity, ingestion-time distributional anomaly detection, or cryptographic provenance attestation. We show this opens a class of steganographic exfiltration attacks: an attacker with write access to the ingestion pipeline can hide payload data inside embeddings using simple post-embedding perturbations (noise injection, rotation, scaling, offset, fragmentation, and combinations thereof) while preserving the surface-l...
| Authors | Jascha Wanger |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 13 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 May 2026 |
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