VectorSmuggle: Steganographic Exfiltration in Embedding Stores and a Cryptographic Provenance Defense (opens in new tab)

Modern retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems convert sensitive content into high-dimensional embeddings and store them in vector databases that treat the resulting numerical artifacts as opaque. Major vector-store products do not provide native controls for embedding integrity, ingestion-time distributional anomaly detection, or cryptographic provenance attestation. We show this opens a class of steganographic exfiltration attacks: an a...