Cordon-MAS: Defending RAG against Knowledge Poisoning via Information-Flow Control
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) increasingly underpins high-stakes applications, yet remains vulnerable to Confundo-style poisoning where adversarially optimized documents manipulate generated outputs. Existing defenses assume that detecting poisoned evidence prevents harm. We show this assumption is incorrect: models exhibit a monitoring-control gap -- they can detect contradictions in retrieved evidence yet still act on poisoned claims. We introduce the Cordon Principle -- no agent capable of final synthesis may access untrusted natural-language evidence -- and realize it through CORDON-MAS, a compartmentalized framework that enforces this principle architecturally by separating ev...
| Authors | Zhe Yu, Wenpeng Xing, Gaolei Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 26 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 May 2026 |
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