Denial of AI Service
Adversaries may target AI-enabled systems with a flood of requests for the purpose of degrading or shutting down the service. Since many AI systems require significant amounts of specialized compute, they are often expensive bottlenecks that can become overloaded. Adversaries can intentionally craft inputs that require heavy amounts of useless compute from the AI system.
> curated attacks (2)
Code Execution & API-Key Theft in MathGPT via Prompt Injection
A public Streamlit app turned GPT-3 output into executed Python. A prompt-injection payload made the model emit code that read the host's environment variables, exfiltrated the app's OpenAI API key, and crashed the service.
Sponge Examples & Denial-of-Wallet: Exhausting AI Systems
Inputs crafted to maximize compute and latency ('sponge examples') can degrade or deny an AI service; against metered LLM APIs the same idea becomes denial-of-wallet — driving up an operator's bill or throttling availability with expensive queries.