# Enterprise AI Must Enforce Participant-Aware Access Control

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14608 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14608/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07805/) (2020)
- [Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12173/) (2023)
- [Ignore Previous Prompt: Attack Techniques For Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09527/) (2022)
- [Quantifying Memorization Across Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07646/) (2022)
- [Extracting Training Data from Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13188/) (2023)
- [Deduplicating Training Data Makes Language Models Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06499/) (2021)
- [Scalable Extraction of Training Data from (Production) Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17035/) (2023)
- [NeMo Guardrails: A Toolkit for Controllable and Safe LLM Applications with Programmable Rails](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10501/) (2023)
- [Deduplicating Training Data Mitigates Privacy Risks in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06539/) (2022)
- [Analyzing Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00539/) (2023)
- [Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks With Spotlighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14720/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking and Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14197/) (2023)
- [Memorization Without Overfitting: Analyzing the Training Dynamics of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10770/) (2022)
- [SecAlign: Defending Against Prompt Injection with Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05451/) (2024)
- [MemGuard: Defending against Black-Box Membership Inference Attacks via Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10594/) (2019)
- [Quantifying Privacy Risks of Masked Language Models Using Membership Inference Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03929/) (2022)
- [DataSentinel: A Game-Theoretic Detection of Prompt Injection Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11358/) (2025)
- [How much do language models copy from their training data? Evaluating linguistic novelty in text generation using RAVEN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09509/) (2021)
- [Jatmo: Prompt Injection Defense by Task-Specific Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17673/) (2023)
- [Practical Membership Inference Attacks against Fine-tuned Large Language Models via Self-prompt Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06062/) (2023)
- [RAG vs Fine-tuning: Pipelines, Tradeoffs, and a Case Study on Agriculture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08406/) (2024)
- [Efficient Methods for Natural Language Processing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00099/) (2022)
- [Attack Prompt Generation for Red Teaming and Defending Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12505/) (2023)
- [Get my drift? Catching LLM Task Drift with Activation Deltas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00799/) (2024)
- [RTBAS: Defending LLM Agents Against Prompt Injection and Privacy Leakage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08966/) (2025)
- [Training Production Language Models without Memorizing User Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10031/) (2020)
- [LLM-PBE: Assessing Data Privacy in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12787/) (2024)
- [User Inference Attacks on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09266/) (2023)
- [Permissive Information-Flow Analysis for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03055/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [MAGPIE: A benchmark for Multi-AGent contextual PrIvacy Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15186/) (2025)
- [Role-Conditioned Refusals: Evaluating Access Control Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07642/) (2025)
- [Schema-First Retrieval: Embedding Catalogs for Natural Language Analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28387/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in enterprise settings where they interact with multiple users and are trained or fine-tuned on sensitive internal data. While fine-tuning enhances performance by internalizing domain knowledge, it also introduces a critical security risk: leakage of confidential training data to unauthorized users. These risks are exacerbated when LLMs are combined with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines that dynamically fetch contextual documents at inference time. We demonstrate data exfiltration attacks on AI assistants where adversaries can exploit current fine-tuning and RAG architectures to leak sensitive information by leveraging the lack of access control enforcement. We show that existing defenses, including prompt sanitization, output filtering, system isolation, and training-level privacy mechanisms, are fundamentally probabilistic and fail to offer robust protection against such attacks. We take the position that only a deterministic and rigorous enforcement of fine-grained access control during both fine-tuning and RAG-based inference can reliably prevent the leakage of sensitive data to unauthorized recipients. We introduce a framework centered on the principle that any content used in training, retrieval, or generation by an LLM is explicitly authorized for all users involved in the interaction. Our approach offers a simple yet powerful paradigm shift for building secure multi-user LLM systems that are grounded in classical access control but adapted to the unique challenges of modern AI workflows. Our solution has been deployed in Microsoft Copilot Tuning, a product offering that enables organizations to fine-tune models using their own enterprise-specific data.
