Large Language Models (LLMs) enhanced with Retrieval-Augmented Generation
(RAG) have shown improved performance in generating accurate responses.
However, the dependence on external knowledge bases introduces potential
security vulnerabilities, particularly when these knowledge bases are publicly
accessible and modifiable. While previous studies have exposed knowledge
poisoning risks in RAG systems, existing attack methods suffer from critical
limitations: they either require injecting multiple poisoned documents
(resulting in poor stealthiness) or can only function effectively on simplistic
queries (limiting real-world applicability). This paper reveals a more
realistic knowledge poisoning attack against RAG systems that achieves
successful attacks by poisoning only a single document while remaining
effective for complex multi-hop questions involving complex relationships
between multiple elements. Our proposed AuthChain address three challenges to
ensure the poisoned documents are reliably retrieved and trusted by the LLM,
even against large knowledge bases and LLM's own knowledge. Extensive
experiments across six popular LLMs demonstrate that AuthChain achieves
significantly higher attack success rates while maintaining superior
stealthiness against RAG defense mechanisms compared to state-of-the-art
baselines.