What it means
RAG security controls protect source ingestion, indexing, retrieval, context assembly, and grounded response generation.
Why it matters
A secure model can still be compromised by poisoned documents, broken authorization, stale indexes, or context that contains executable instructions.
Practical focus
- Define the approved purpose, accountable owner, users, operating environment, and acceptable risk for rag security controls before implementation or procurement
- Implement source validation, malware and instruction scanning, tenant isolation, authorization-aware retrieval, context filtering, citations, and index rollback through documented architecture, policy, configuration, and change control
- Collect ingestion provenance, index versions, permission tests, poisoned-document exercises, grounding scores, and rollback records and compare the results with approved requirements, risk thresholds, and expected outcomes
- Exercise this failure scenario as a planned test: an attacker uploads a document that ranks highly and instructs the model to ignore policy or expose another tenant's data
Common mistakes
- Using the label rag security controls without defining the exact system boundary, decision, data, and people in scope
- Treating a model response or vendor claim as sufficient evidence without testing the surrounding application and operating process
- Failing to preserve ingestion provenance, index versions, permission tests, poisoned-document exercises, grounding scores, and rollback records in a form that lets reviewers reconstruct decisions and changes
- Testing only the normal path and never rehearsing what happens when an attacker uploads a document that ranks highly and instructs the model to ignore policy or expose another tenant's data
Certification relevance
This subject appears in or supports the following certification bodies of knowledge: