Security & governance · Glossary term
What is Indirect Prompt Injection?
A prompt-injection attack delivered through content the system retrieves or observes, such as a webpage, document, email, image text, or tool result, rather than directly through the user's instruction.
Why does Indirect Prompt Injection matter?
An agent can encounter attacker-controlled instructions while performing an authorized task and mistake that content for authority-bearing guidance.
Indirect Prompt Injection in practice
Label external content as untrusted data, separate it from instructions, minimize tool permissions, require approval for consequential actions, and include malicious retrieved content in regression tests.
What is the common confusion about Indirect Prompt Injection?
Indirect describes the delivery path, not a weaker attack. A hidden instruction in retrieved content can be as consequential as a direct user prompt.
Learn Indirect Prompt Injection in the course
Start with
- Indirect Prompt Injection — Production Attack Surface
Indirect prompt injection (IPI) embeds instructions inside external content — a web page, an email, a shared document, a support ticket — consumed by an agentic system without explicit user action.
Taught in Phase 18: Ethics, Safety & Alignment.
Related terms
- Prompt InjectionAn attack or failure mode in which untrusted content influences a model to disregard intended instructions, expose data, misuse tools, or…
- Instruction HierarchyA rule set for resolving conflicts among instructions from sources with different authority, such as application policy, users, and…
- Trust BoundaryAn interface where data, instructions, identity, or authority crosses between components or principals that operate under different trust…
- Data ExfiltrationUnauthorized transfer of protected data from a system or trust zone to a person, tool, service, or storage location that is not permitted…
Sources
More terms in Security & governance
- AI Risk Assessment
- Audit Log
- Content Provenance
- Data Classification
- Data Exfiltration
- Data Lineage
- Data Minimization
- Datasheet for Datasets
- Defense in Depth
- Jailbreak
- Membership Inference
- Provenance Attestation
- Purpose Limitation
- Red Teaming
- Separation of Duties
- Software Bill of Materials (SBOM)
- Threat Model
- Trust Boundary
- Zero Trust
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