Graphs Don't Stay Secret: Practical Subgraph Reconstruction Attacks on Defended Graph RAG
For developers of Graph RAG systems, this work reveals a practical privacy and security threat that existing defenses fail to address, and offers effective countermeasures.
The paper introduces GRASP, a closed-box multi-turn attack that reconstructs subgraphs from defended Graph RAG systems, achieving up to 82.9 F1 where prior methods fail. It also proposes two mitigations that reduce reconstruction fidelity without utility loss.
Graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (Graph RAG) is increasingly deployed to support LLM applications by augmenting user queries with structured knowledge retrieved from a knowledge graph. While Graph RAG improves relational reasoning, it introduces a largely understudied threat: adversaries can reconstruct subgraphs from a target RAG system's knowledge graph, enabling privacy inference and replication of curated knowledge assets. We show that existing attacks are largely ineffective against Graph RAG even with simple prompt-based safeguards, because these attacks expose explicit exfiltration intent and are therefore easily suppressed by lightweight safe prompts. We identify three technical challenges for practical Graph RAG extraction under realistic safeguards and introduce GRASP, a closed-box, multi-turn subgraph reconstruction attack. GRASP (i) reframes extraction as a context-processing task, (ii) enforces format-compliant, instance-grounded outputs via per-record identifiers to reduce hallucinations and preserve relational details, and (iii) diversifies goal-driven attack queries using a discovery-aware scheduler to operate within strict query budgets. Across two real-world knowledge graphs, four safety-aligned LLMs, and multiple Graph RAG frameworks, GRASP attains the strongest type-faithful reconstruction where prior methods fail, reaching up to 82.9 F1. We further evaluate defenses and propose two mitigations that effectively reduce reconstruction fidelity without utility loss.