SearchInject: Retrieval Exposure Control for Indirect Prompt Injection in Language-Model Search

Kainan Zhou, Gangzhen Qian, Janet Sung, Zhi Jing, Rong Bao +1

An indirect prompt injection can affect a search-augmented large language model only after its carrier page reaches model context. SearchInject controls this admission decision with a joint score combining retrieval relevance, search-abuse cues, instruction likelihood, and two relevance interactions. A quarantine threshold is selected under an empirical 0.5% clean-candidate false-quarantine constraint on a calibration split. Evaluation uses 300 held-out SciFact queries and held-out payload categories within four construction families already represented during development. Across 1,200 query-family outcomes per retriever, top-10 target exposure falls from 0.9408 to 0.1583 for BM25, from 0.9158 to 0.1508 for a normalized hybrid, and from 0.8450 to 0.1375 for latent semantic analysis. These are relative reductions of 83.2-83.7%; the largest absolute change in clean normalized discounted cumulative gain at rank 10 is 0.0018. The frozen threshold yields clean test false-quarantine rates of 0.59-0.65%, above the empirical calibration constraint. A query-level analytical reanalysis accounts for the repeated construction outcomes under an independent-query assumption. A separate…