Versatile AI Risk Assessment

Glossary Systems and architecture

RAG (retrieval augmented generation)

The model pulls matching documents from your own knowledge base before answering.

As of: September 2026 · Glossary with 28 terms

What is RAG (retrieval augmented generation)?

With retrieval augmented generation the system searches its own knowledge base for matching passages before answering and hands them to the model as context. That way it answers from current in-house documents without retraining the model.

What matters for security is that retrieved content lands in the same context window as the instructions. A planted document in the knowledge base therefore acts like an instruction to the model. Permissions matter too: retrieval must mirror the access rights of the person asking, otherwise the knowledge base becomes a data leak.

Vector databasePrompt InjectionPermissions

Threats using this term (6)

Entries in the threat catalogue whose text uses the term. Every link leads to the full threat page.

Prompt Injection – Indirect Malicious instructions hide inside external content such as documents, web pages, or emails. Factual Inconsistencies (Hallucinations) AI language models sometimes produce content that sounds convincing but is simply made up (hallucinations), including citations, figures, … RAG-Specific Attacks (Document Poisoning) Attackers plant prepared documents in the knowledge base an AI system draws on via RAG (retrieval-augmented generation, looking up … Cross-Tenant Leakage (Multi-Tenant Vector DB) On AI platforms that serve several customers on shared infrastructure, one customer's data can surface in another customer's answers when … Graph-RAG Poisoning (Knowledge Graph Injection) Some AI systems ground their answers in a knowledge graph, a network of concepts and their relationships (Graph RAG). Agent Memory Poisoning (Persistent Context) AI agents with persistent memory carry information from earlier sessions forward as trusted context for future decisions.

More terms from the subject area Systems and architecture.

GPAI and systemic risk Foundation models for many tasks, with their own duties and a separate tier for systemic risk. Agentic system (agentic AI) A system that uses a language model to carry out multi-step tasks on its own. Multi-agent system Several agents share a task and call each other.

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“RAG (retrieval augmented generation)”. Versatile AI Risk Assessment, glossary of AI risk analysis, as of September 2026.
https://www.versatile-ai-risk-assessment.com/en/wissensbasis/glossary/rag/

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