Generative AI has quickly emerged as a groundbreaking technology – and one that’s being adopted faster than the policies dictating how it’s used. In a survey of 700+ data professionals, 54% reported that their organization already leverages at least four AI systems or applications – but 80% say AI is making data security more challenging.
Amid the rapid evolution of GenAI technologies, nailing down a strategy to protect against threats like sensitive data exposure or model poisoning has seemed elusive. But with the growing popularity of RAG-based GenAI applications, we may be turning a corner.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) stands out among LLM development for its ability to enhance the accuracy and relevance of AI outputs, without having to build a model from the ground up. In this blog, we’ll look into what RAG-based generative AI applications are, why they are important, and why they’re key to a scalable GenAI security strategy.
What is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)?
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) augments and strengthens GenAI capabilities by providing timely and domain specific knowledge to a GenAI application. It leverages a large language model (LLM) to generate text, but before doing so retrieves relevant information from external data sources to ground its responses. The integration of LLM responses and external information allows the model to provide more accurate and contextually relevant answers by augmenting its training data with real-time information.
How does Retrieval-Augmented Generation work?
Despite the three-letter acronym, there are five steps to RAG-based processes:
- Identify and convert external data, such as databases, documents, and APIs, into numerical embeddings – or representations of the data – that can be stored in vector databases and easily understood by LLMs.
- Retrieve information relevant to the user query by comparing and matching the external data from step 1 with a vectorized version of the prompt data.
- Augment the prompt data by integrating it with the retrieved data to create an enhanced and contextualized query.
- Generate a response based on the enhanced query, using the retrieved information and the model’s pre-existing data to return a more relevant and accurate answer.
- Maintain and update the external data sources to ensure the information used in responses is accurate and up-to-date.
This approach is particularly useful for organizations looking to infuse their own data into LLMs. Adding proprietary data to an existing LLM is more time- and cost-efficient than building an internal model from scratch, and returns responses that are more tailored to the company’s owned data, perspectives, and objectives than open-framework LLMs.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation use cases across industries
Organizations across industries are increasingly adopting RAG-based applications to drive insights, innovation, and outcomes. A few examples include:
- Healthcare: RAG-based models can identify and combine data from electronic health records (EHRs), genomic databases, and medical guidelines to provide personalized treatment plans that avoid trial-and-error and improve patient outcomes.
- Pharmaceuticals: RAGs retrieve and aggregate scientific literature, clinical trial data, and genomic information to facilitate new drug discovery and development.
- Financial Services: RAG models are able to cross-reference transaction data with known fraud patterns and external data like news reports, to detect suspicious activity in real time and prevent fraud.
- Public Sector: RAG-based systems can retrieve and analyze legislative documents, policy papers, and public opinions to help policymakers form stances that are aligned with both their political records and citizens’ priorities.
- Customer Service: RAG models access a company’s knowledge base, past buyer interactions, and external resources to provide precise answers to questions, reducing wait times and improving the customer experience.
- Manufacturing: RAG-powered predictive maintenance systems are able to analyze records, manuals, and sensor data to forecast equipment failures, recommend maintenance schedules, and prevent production downtime.
- Media: RAG can analyze user preferences, viewing habits, and content metadata to generate personalized recommendations, improve content discovery, and increase subscriber satisfaction and retention.
Value of Retrieval-Augmented Generation for GenAI initiatives
As the examples above show, the benefits of RAG-based generative AI are wide-ranging. And, with most organizations now embracing GenAI in some capacity, RAG offers more precise and actionable insights than open models. But the value of Retrieval-Augmented Generation goes beyond business outcomes – it can also impact your bottom line in another, equally important way.
Many teams aiming to deploy GenAI gravitate toward two options: leverage an existing, open framework like ChatGPT or Gemini, or build their own model. The first option is easy to get off the ground, but tough to refine – you’re at the whim of the data used to train the model, but lacking the domain-specific context you need. The second option is more moldable to your specific needs, but requires substantial overhead – time, money, and resources – to create, train, and deploy with accuracy.
RAG is a happy medium. It offers a more economical approach to utilizing AI models while supplying domain-specific knowledge at the prompt layer, combined with context and precision. Instead of spending time and money continuously retraining models, you can simply update the external data sources that feed into the RAG system, which streamlines operations without additional expenses.
RAG-based generative AI also improves user confidence, satisfaction, and adoption. Users are more likely to trust AI-generated responses that are accurate and cite up-to-date sources. RAGs are particularly effective at this – incorporating the latest information helps ensure that responses are always based on the most current data available. In turn, users are able to make timely decisions without worry that their information is stale or outdated.
Security challenges with Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Despite its benefits, RAG is not foolproof. Like any data source or platform, RAG-based GenAI applications must be deliberately protected from security threats like sensitive data exposure. Left unchecked, these threats can lead to significant data breaches, compromised AI integrity, and loss of user trust.
To help you stay vigilant and ahead of risks, here are the most common threats to RAG systems:
Data breaches and unauthorized access
As with any other data, sensitive information retrieved and used by RAG systems may be exposed if proper data security measures are not in place. Such exposure puts confidential data – such as customer information, proprietary business data, or even intellectual property – at risk. This could result in financial losses and damage to your company’s reputation, among other outcomes.
Data integrity issues
Manipulation or corruption of the data sources that feed RAG systems results in inaccurate or harmful outputs, which in turn can mislead decision-making processes. For example, a healthcare company’s compromised RAG system might retrieve incorrect medical data, leading to erroneous diagnoses and treatment plans, and potentially endangering patients’ lives.
Prompt injection attacks & unauthorized modifications
Malicious actors can manipulate AI prompts, causing models to produce harmful or biased outputs. Alternatively, unauthorized users may alter outputs before they are delivered to end users. Either scenario has the ability to spread misinformation or inappropriate content that hurt your organization’s trust and credibility.
Lack of compliance with regulations
Failure to implement robust data security measures threatens adherence to compliance laws and regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. This may result in substantial fines and legal penalties, along with loss of trust from customers and partners. Additionally, regulatory bodies could impose restrictions on your organization’s operations, further impacting business.
The 3 layers of security for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
As GenAI technologies have quickly evolved, emphasis is often placed on prompt security – in other words, protecting the data provided by the user at query time. But, this doesn’t take into account additional domain-specific data or external data retrieved by RAGs. Controlling this additional data requires durable, automated decisions to regulate what information is used within the prompt.
Therefore, to truly secure RAG-based GenAI applications effectively, you need security, access control, and data monitoring at three critical layers:
1. The Storage Tier, where unstructured data remains at rest. Data access control ensures that objects in storage are only used for approved AI use cases.
2. The Data Tier, where unstructured data is chunked for RAG use cases, giving it some structure and allowing for more granular filtering of sensitive data.
2a. Chunking breaks large text data into smaller, manageable segments, making data retrieval and response generation more efficient and accurate. This improves the RAG model’s precision and context-based responses, improving performance and speed while reducing the computational load. In practice, chunking allows a system to pinpoint and utilize the most relevant sections from a large volume of documents, rather than attempting to process the entire set at once.
3. The Prompt Tier, where users interact with the RAG application. As mentioned, this is the last line of defense – making the need for protection at the previous two layers that much more critical. With the right controls and monitoring, you’re able to filter responses and verify that there are no hallucinations.
Implementing data security and monitoring across these three layers strengthens your defenses for RAG-based GenAI applications.
How to secure RAG-based GenAI applications
Securing RAG-based GenAI applications requires a comprehensive approach that addresses potential vulnerabilities at every layer. Incorporating these best practices will help safeguard your AI systems, regardless of where data lives across platforms:
- Enforce dynamic access controls based on user, object, environment, and purpose-based attributes to ensure that only authorized users or service accounts have access to specific data.
- Regularly assess risk and audit queries with automated data monitoring and reporting to help proactively identify and mitigate threats.
- Centralize security and monitoring so that policies are enforced and audited consistently across every platform in your tech stack, and information retrieved by RAG systems is protected regardless of where it resides.
- Mandate training and awareness for employees that reinforce cloud data security best practices and how to recognize potential threats so that data protection remains top of mind.
Putting Retrieval-Augmented Generation into practice
RAG-based applications represent a significant advancement in AI, offering enhanced accuracy, cost-effectiveness, and real-time data integration. However, securing these applications is paramount. As RAG adoption continues to grow, so will the mandate to protect them – and by extension, protect your AI initiatives.
By implementing robust security measures across the storage, data, and prompt tiers, you’ll protect your AI systems while ensuring they are reliable and trustworthy. In the race for high-precision, performant, and adaptable AI, RAG-based GenAI security isn’t just aspirational – it is a competitive advantage.
To find out more about Immuta’s approach, read this blog.