Microsoft uncovers ‘Whisper Leak’ attack that identifies AI chat topics in encrypted traffic

Microsoft has disclosed details of a novel side-channel attack targeting remote language models that could enable a passive adversary with capabilities to observe network traffic to glean details about model conversation topics despite encryption protections under certain circumstances.

This leakage of data exchanged between humans and streaming-mode language models could pose serious risks to the privacy of user and enterprise communications, the company noted. The attack has been codenamed Whisper Leak.

“Cyber attackers in a position to observe the encrypted traffic (for example, a nation-state actor at the internet service provider layer, someone on the local network, or someone connected to the same Wi-Fi router) could use this cyber attack to infer if the user’s prompt is on a specific topic,” security researchers Jonathan Bar Or and Geoff McDonald, along with the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team, said.

Read more at The Hacker News