Principal research manager at the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) and visiting lecturer at University of Oxford.

Cambridge, England
Joined July 2009
As enterprises adopt large language models (LLMs), a new class of threats has emerged: indirect prompt injection. This attack vector targets systems that process untrusted data with LLMs, tricking them into misinterpreting malicious input as instructions. The risks include data exfiltration, unintended actions, and more. In a new blog, Andrew Paverd, Principal Research Manager, outlines how Microsoft defends against these threats with a defense-in-depth strategy that includes: • Design-time techniques, such as Spotlighting, to reduce the risk of prompt injection • Inference-time detections, such as Microsoft Prompt Shields integrated with Defender for Cloud • Mitigations to deterministically block potential security impacts • Ongoing research into new design patterns and deterministic defenses Learn how Microsoft is securing LLM-based systems against indirect prompt injection: msft.it/6011syiF9
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Andrew Paverd retweeted
Come and test your skills at prompt injection! Bring your best attacks
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The first day of the challenge was already quite a hit!! 🥳 Thanks so much to everyone who participated so far. There are still many unsolved levels, come and claim them!
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We’re excited to announce LLMail-Inject: The Adaptive Prompt Injection Challenge! This challenge will test your skills at bypassing LLM-based systems in a simulated environment and features 40 levels of varying difficulty, where you will craft emails to persuade an LLM agent to perform specific actions. No GPUs or LLM API credits needed—just sign up with your GitHub account and form a team. The top 4 teams will share a prize pool of $10,000 USD. Ready to take part in the challenge? Check out our blog post to learn how to get started: msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2024…
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📢 Have experience jailbreaking LLMs? Want to learn how an indirect / cross prompt injection attack works? Want to try something different to an advent of code? Then, I have a challenge for you! The LLMail-Inject competition just started.
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"Trustworthy AI Using Confidential Federated Learning," by Jinnan Guo (@ImperialCollege), @PPietzuch (@LSDSImperial), @AJPaverd (@MsftSecResponse), Kapil Vaswani (@MSFTResearch), describes how Confidential Federated Learning addresses Classic FL gaps. bit.ly/4dLIgla
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⚡️We have a special guest for #CDTS24! Andrew Paverd (@ajpaverd) from @msftsecresponse will be joining the 3rd panel session, join the waiting list for the chance to hear his expertise on Generative AI & security🦾🔒. Grab your free ticket: tinyurl.com/bdzb463w @UoM_CDTS xitter.cf/DigitalUoM/status/1806…
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Our new AI bug bounty program is now live! Excited to be part of the fantastic team that made this happen!
Aanchal Gupta @nchlgpt, Deputy CISO and CVP at Microsoft, announced the new AI bounty program with awards up to $15,000 as part of the #BlueHat Day 2 Keynote. Learn more in our blog post: msft.it/60129twxk
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We're hiring AI Security Researchers for @msftsecresponse! These roles offer a unique opportunity to solve emerging AI security & privacy challenges, through cutting-edge scientific research, informed by real-world vulnerability data. Apply here: jobs.careers.microsoft.com/g…
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Excited to share what I've been working on for the past few months, in collaboration with colleagues across Microsoft!
We’ve released the Microsoft severity classification for common vulnerability types for systems involving Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning (AI/ML). We use this information as guidelines to triage bugs and determine severity. Learn more: msft.it/60139yZDl
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Looking forward to discussing the security of AI with @ram_ssk tomorrow evening at @WaterstonesCamb, where he'll be signing copies of his new book (coauthored with @drhyrum)! Event: 31 May, 6pm Registration: waterstones.com/events/machi…
Cambridge (🇬🇧) fixture @WaterstonesCamb will be hosting me for a book talk -- all things AI, security and ChatGPT Moderated by the adversarial ML expert @ajpaverd Time: May 31, 6.00 pm Registration link👇 waterstones.com/events/machi… cc: @drhyrum
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We're excited to announce the winners of the Microsoft Membership Inference Competition (MICO), at IEEE SaTML @satml_conf. With MICO, we wanted to assess the state of the art on membership inference attacks against differentially private model training. microsoft.github.io/MICO/?1
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👻 is back! Excited to announce "Hide and Seek with Spectres", our paper accepted to @IEEESSP'23. We present a tool for fast discovery of spec. vulnerabilities in x86 CPUs, and two new speculative leaks we found. 📑arXiv: arxiv.org/pdf/2301.07642.pdf 🔬tool: github.com/microsoft/sca-fuz…
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Andrew Paverd retweeted
There's still time to register&take part in the membership inference competition (MICO)! Info here: github.com/microsoft/MICO 4 tasks available: image, text, tabular, and a combination of the 3 providing additional info ("DP distinguisher"). Keep the submissions coming!
Some pretty simple approaches got me to the top of the leaderboard. Could use some more competitors to make this more interesting and valuable to the community. Credit to @drhyrum for sharing this a few weeks ago, otherwise I wouldn't have seen it.
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Andrew Paverd retweeted
About 11 days left to the first @DIMVAConf submission deadline! xitter.cf/DIMVAConf/status/15920…
📢 The #DIMVA23 CfP is up! dimva2023.de/cfp/ DIMVA will be from July 12-14, 2023, in Hamburg. New this year: for the first time with 2 submission deadlines, first one already on December 7.
Andrew Paverd retweeted
Together with @jovanbulck I am again organizing a confidential computing devroom @fosdem . Submit talks on open source topics by December 2 2022 and come to Brussels on February 5 2023 or watch the livestream. Looking forward! falder.org/fosdem23-cfp
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Andrew Paverd retweeted
Some big and exciting news! We're hiring 6 new Assistant Professors across a wide range of areas in Computer Science @Cambridge_CL ow.ly/NobH50L0OFb. Here's a run-down of them all 1/8
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Looking forward to discussing Pre-Hijacked Accounts with @sudoavi at this live event tomorrow!
Please join us Wed Sep 28 at 8AM PST (UTC-8) for our next MSRC Experts Forum with Avinash Sudhodanan (@sudoavi) & MSRC's Andrew Paverd (@ajpaverd) to discuss Pre-hijacked Accounts: a new class of attacks affecting websites & online services. Register here: aka.ms/MSRC-Registration
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