RAG Pipeline Security
RAG's promise is grounding LLM output in your authoritative corpus. Its risk is that your corpus is now a query-able attack surface.
- Vendor
- RAG architecture
- Product
- Custom Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipelines
- Guide covers
- Central risk, specific risks, recommended controls, and your Posture Check checkpoint
What it is
Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipelines combine an LLM with a vector store containing chunked organizational documents. User queries embed into vectors; relevant chunks retrieve from the store; chunks plus query feed the LLM as context for generation. RAG is the dominant pattern for grounded enterprise LLM applications.
The central risk
Vector store access controls. The vector store contains organizational knowledge in embedded form. If it lacks access controls aligned to source-document permissions, retrieval bypasses authorization. Plus: corpus integrity (poisoning), embedding inversion (recovering source text), and prompt injection through retrieved chunks.
Specific risks in Custom Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipelines
Vector-store retrieval bypassing source-document permissions
Corpus poisoning through indirect indexing of unsanitized content
Embedding inversion attacks recovering training text from embeddings
Indirect prompt injection through retrieved chunks (LLM01)
Sensitive data leakage through retrieval (LLM02)
Recommended controls
Access control on vector retrieval aligned to source-document ACLs
Embedding-store encryption at rest
Corpus content review and provenance tracking
Retrieval audit logging
Prompt-injection testing against retrieved-content scenarios
Score yourself before you roll out Custom Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipelines.
The AI Posture Check is a free five-question adaptive self-assessment that maps your gaps to specific OWASP LLM Top 10 risks for Custom Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipelines.
OWASP LLM08 (Vector and Embedding Weaknesses) maps directly here. Data and model controls feed your AI Posture Check stage.
Take the AI Posture CheckGet a Standard Audit on your Custom Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipelines deployment.
A senior CWS engineer reviews your specific deployment, runs adversarial tests, and produces a remediation roadmap.