For Heads-of · Practitioner
System prompt leakage
The system prompt is extracted or inferred, exposing configuration, guardrail logic, or embedded credentials.
- medium
- llm
- system-prompt
- owasp-llm
How it happens
An attacker uses direct questioning, indirect probing, or output-pattern analysis to reconstruct all or part of a system prompt that was assumed to be hidden from the user.
Why it matters
A leaked system prompt hands an attacker the guardrail logic to route around, plus any embedded secrets or business logic it wasn't designed to expose.
Mitigating controls
The controls that address this risk, ranked by effectiveness.
Framework and clause references
| Framework | Clause | Title |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications | LLM08 | Hidden Context Exposure |
Related resources
The external sources behind this risk, from the Resources library.