The whole industry will understand the importance of prompt injection in the next few months.

· Bits and Bobs 4/21/25
  • The whole industry will understand the importance of prompt injection in the next few months.
    • In the past, only a small number of engineers had to think about code injection attacks, where untrusted code runs with access to trusted resources.
      • Typically only people writing operating systems, or eval'ing untrusted code had to care.
      • Many engineers dealt with the baby version of code injection, SQL injection.
        • SQL has no separation of control plane and data plane, so it's inherently vulnerable to injection attacks.
        • But SQL is also a highly regular language.
        • It's such a constrained grammar, you can throw a wrench in it easily.
        • It's child's play to prevent injection with a bit of escaping.
    • Now LLMs with tool use allow all data to be executable.
    • A massive expansion of threat surface area.
    • So now all of the systems builders are thrust into the world of operating systems security, even if they don't realize it.
    • Prompt injection sets the ceiling for integration with LLMs.
    • This is clear to anyone who's worked in operating systems before.
    • It will become more obvious to everyone else over the next few months.

More on this topic

From other episodes