Your AI Assistant has a Big Mouth: A New Side-Channel Attack

Presented at DEF CON 32 (2024), Aug. 11, 2024, 1 p.m. (45 minutes).

AI assistants like ChatGPT are changing how we interact with technology. But what if someone could read your confidential chats? Imagine awkwardly asking your AI about a strange rash, or to edit an email, only to have that conversation exposed to someone on the net. In this talk we'll unveil a novel side-channel vulnerability in popular AI assistants and demonstrate how it can be used to read encrypted messages sent from AI Assistants. Before our disclosure, major players like OpenAI, Microsoft, Cloudflare, Quora, and Notion were at risk. We'll reveal the technical details of this exploit and show real-world examples of intercepted conversations. This talk isn't just about the problem – learn how to identify this vulnerability in other AI assistants as well! We'll dissect network traffic, discuss attack models, and explore the far-reaching consequences of this discovery. References: 1. Samuel Addington. Chatgpt: Cyber security threats and countermeasures. Available at SSRN 4425678, 2023. 2. Benjamin Harsha, Robert Morton, Jeremiah Blocki, John Springer, and Melissa Dark. Bicycle attacks con- sidered harmful: Quantifying the damage of widespread password length leakage. Computers & Security, 100:102068, 2021. 3. John V Monaco. What are you searching for? a remote keylogging attack on search engine autocomplete. In 28th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 19), pages 959–976, 2019.

Presenters:

  • Yisroel Mirsky - Tenure-Track Lecturer and Zuckerman Faculty Scholar, Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University
    Dr. Yisroel Mirsky is a tenure-track lecturer and Zuckerman Faculty Scholar in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University and the head of the Offensive AI Research Lab there. His main research interests include deepfakes, adversarial machine learning, anomaly detection, and intrusion detection. Dr. Mirsky has published his work in some of the best security venues: USENIX, CCS, NDSS, Euro S&P, Black Hat, DEFCON AI Village, RSA, CSF, AISec, etc. His research has also been featured in many well-known media outlets: Popular Science, Scientific American, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and BBC. Some of his works include the exposure of vulnerabilities in the US 911 emergency services and research into the threat of deepfakes in medical scans, both featured in The Washington Post.
  • Guy Amit - PhD Candidate Student, Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
    Guy Amit works at IBM Research and is a PhD candidate student in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His research interests include machine learning, adversarial learning, and IoT cyber security.
  • Daniel Ayzenshteyn - Researcher and Master's Degree Student, Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
    Daniel Ayzenshteyn is a researcher and master's degree student in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His research interests span Network Security, Cyber Security and Network Modeling.
  • Roy Weiss - Researcher and Master's Degree Student, Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
    Roy Weiss is a researcher and a master's degree student in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His research interests include Cyber Security, Network Security and Deep Learning.

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