ML Security PapersDRAINCODE: Stealthy Energy Consumption Attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation via Context Poisoning
Yanlin Wang, Jiadong Wu, Tianyue Jiang et al. · Sun Yat-Sen University · Nanyang Technological University +1 more
Poisons RAG retrieval contexts with mutated code to force LLMs into verbose outputs, causing 85% latency and 49% energy consumption increases.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in code generation by leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods. However, the computational costs associated with LLM inference, particularly in terms of latency and energy consumption, have received limited attention in the security context. This paper introduces DrainCode, the first adversarial attack targeting the computational efficiency of RAG-based code generation systems. By strategically poisoning retrieval contexts through a mutation-based approach, DrainCode forces LLMs to produce significantly longer outputs, thereby increasing GPU latency and energy consumption. We evaluate the effectiveness of DrainCode across multiple models. Our experiments show that DrainCode achieves up to an 85% increase in latency, a 49% increase in energy consumption, and more than a 3x increase in output length compared to the baseline. Furthermore, we demonstrate the generalizability of the attack across different prompting strategies and its effectiveness compared to different defenses. The results highlight DrainCode as a potential method for increasing the computational overhead of LLMs, making it useful for evaluating LLM security in resource-constrained environments. We provide code and data at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/DrainCode.