Semantic Cache Poisoning: Corrupting the "Fast Path"
IT InstaTunnel Team Published by our engineering team Semantic Cache Poisoning: Corrupting the “Fast Path” ⚡🧠Executive Summary In the race to optimize Large Language Model (LLM) backends for cost and latency, Semantic Caching has become the industry standard for 2026 architectures. However, this efficiency layer introduces a critical vulnerability: Semantic Cache Poisoning . By exploiting the “fuzzy” nature of vector embeddings, attackers can force a system to associate a benign user query with a malicious cached response. This article deconstructs the attack mechanics, explores the “2026-era” threat landscape involving agentic workflows, examines cutting-edge research on Key Collision Attacks , and provides actionable mitigation strategies for engineering teams building production LLM systems. 1. Introduction: The Efficiency Trap By 2026, the “brute force” era of AI inference is over. Running every single user query through a massive frontier model (lik...