These labels were automatically added by AI and may be inaccurate. For details, see About Literature Database.
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have shown state-of-the-art results in
translating natural language questions into SQL queries (Text-to-SQL), a
long-standing challenge within the database community. However, security
concerns remain largely unexplored, particularly the threat of backdoor
attacks, which can introduce malicious behaviors into models through
fine-tuning with poisoned datasets. In this work, we systematically investigate
the vulnerabilities of LLM-based Text-to-SQL models and present ToxicSQL, a
novel backdoor attack framework. Our approach leverages stealthy {semantic and
character-level triggers} to make backdoors difficult to detect and remove,
ensuring that malicious behaviors remain covert while maintaining high model
accuracy on benign inputs. Furthermore, we propose leveraging SQL injection
payloads as backdoor targets, enabling the generation of malicious yet
executable SQL queries, which pose severe security and privacy risks in
language model-based SQL development. We demonstrate that injecting only 0.44%
of poisoned data can result in an attack success rate of 79.41%, posing a
significant risk to database security. Additionally, we propose detection and
mitigation strategies to enhance model reliability. Our findings highlight the
urgent need for security-aware Text-to-SQL development, emphasizing the
importance of robust defenses against backdoor threats.