Hop-Decayed Influence: New Vulnerabilities of Structural Auxiliary Indexing in GraphRAG Pipelines with LLM

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances LLMs by grounding generation in query-relevant external evidence. Beyond unstructured text corpora, Graph RAG integrates knowledge graphs into the retrieval pipeline, enabling LLMs to access entities, relations, and multi-hop dependencies encoded in structured knowledge. However, the same structured knowledge that empowers Graph RAG also creates a new privacy attack surface. We demonstrate that Graph RAG systems can be turned into structural oracles: through adaptive black-box interactions, an adversary can elicit sufficient relational evidence to reconstruct substantial portions of the hidden knowledge graph. We propose a structure-oriented reconstruction framework that recovers targeted graphs from both local and global perspectives. Specifically, Depth-Wise Heuristic Search extracts fine-grained node attributes by recursively expanding entity-centered evidence, while Breadth-Wise Diffusion Search infers graph topology by propagating across relation-induced neighborhoods. Experiments on generic and healthcare scenarios demonstrate that our method can recover over 90% of the original knowledge graph from representative Graph RAG systems, revealing sensitive entities, relations, and structural dependencies with high fidelity. Existing guradrails provide limited defense against our attack, highlighting the inherent difficulty of safeguarding structural privacy in Graph RAG pipelines.

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding their responses in structured knowledge graphs. Leveraging community detection and relation filtering techniques, GraphRAG systems demonstrate inherent resistance to traditional RAG attacks, such as text poisoning and prompt injection. However, in this paper, we find that the security of GraphRAG systems fundamentally relies on the topological integrity of the underlying graph, which can be undermined by implicitly corrupting the logical connections, without altering surface-level text semantics. To exploit this vulnerability, we propose LogicPoison, a novel attack framework that targets logical reasoning rather than injecting false contents. Specifically, LogicPoison employs a type-preserving entity swapping mechanism to perturb both global logic hubs for disrupting overall graph connectivity and query-specific reasoning bridges for severing essential multi-hop inference paths. This approach effectively reroutes valid reasoning into dead ends while maintaining surface-level textual plausibility. Comprehensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that LogicPoison successfully bypasses GraphRAG's defenses, significantly degrading performance and outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in both effectiveness and stealth. Our code is available at \textcolor{blue}https://github.com/Jord8061/logicPoison.

Graph retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) uses document-derived knowledge graphs to assemble evidence for large language model (LLM) answers. Its security depends on both the seed chunks retrieved for a query and the graph evidence assembled from them, yet attacks on this evidence path remain underexplored. We introduce GraphRAG-LTM, a Layered Threat Modeling framework that tests three nested levels of attacker access. BB Query uses ranking feedback to make query edits under a semantic-similarity constraint and demote relevant seed chunks. WB Query uses retriever gradients for the same objective. Graph-aware WB keeps the white-box adversarial query and deletes bridge triplets from the query-specific evidence graph, disrupting multi-hop evidence propagation through localized graph edits. Across datasets, retrievers, and LLM backbones, rank feedback alone reduces answer quality, gradient access strengthens query attacks, and bridge-triplet deletion further impairs supporting-fact retrieval. Further analyses show how seed retrieval and graph evidence jointly contribute to these failures.