Prompt Compression Emerges as New Attack Surface
jiqizhixin · x · 2026-07-16
Researchers from HKUST have introduced a novel attack targeting prompt compression: when trusted and untrusted inputs share a compression budget, attackers can trick the compressor into prematurely deleting critical evidence or safety rules, causing the LLM to lose vital information before even processing the content.
Dubbed COMA, this attack leverages a surrogate compressor to find subtle perturbations that trigger faulty compression. The paper reports a success rate of 0.71 across tasks like tool selection, QA, and system prompt corruption, significantly outperforming existing methods which hover around 0.21.
More from Safety
- Hugging Face chief says U.S. guardrails forced a Chinese model into a real cyber defense — Nunki08 · 2026-07-21
- AgentBaiting uses 600 fake MCP and Skills listings to lure AI assistants — TechNadu · 2026-07-21
- Enterprise LLM security course focuses on protecting agentic AI apps — Independentgoats · 2026-07-21
- YouTube is cracking down on mass-produced synthetic videos, users say — No_Link7744 · 2026-07-21
- Suno breach talk is being muted in Discord, Reddit users say — chuckbeefcake · 2026-07-21
- Native and Cyera link data discovery to cloud access controls for AI use — TechNadu · 2026-07-21