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Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in enterprise settings
where they interact with multiple users and are trained or fine-tuned on
sensitive internal data. While fine-tuning enhances performance by
internalizing domain knowledge, it also introduces a critical security risk:
leakage of confidential training data to unauthorized users. These risks are
exacerbated when LLMs are combined with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
pipelines that dynamically fetch contextual documents at inference time.
We demonstrate data exfiltration attacks on AI assistants where adversaries
can exploit current fine-tuning and RAG architectures to leak sensitive
information by leveraging the lack of access control enforcement. We show that
existing defenses, including prompt sanitization, output filtering, system
isolation, and training-level privacy mechanisms, are fundamentally
probabilistic and fail to offer robust protection against such attacks.
We take the position that only a deterministic and rigorous enforcement of
fine-grained access control during both fine-tuning and RAG-based inference can
reliably prevent the leakage of sensitive data to unauthorized recipients.
We introduce a framework centered on the principle that any content used in
training, retrieval, or generation by an LLM is explicitly authorized for
\emph{all users involved in the interaction}. Our approach offers a simple yet
powerful paradigm shift for building secure multi-user LLM systems that are
grounded in classical access control but adapted to the unique challenges of
modern AI workflows. Our solution has been deployed in Microsoft Copilot
Tuning, a product offering that enables organizations to fine-tune models using
their own enterprise-specific data.