Problems / AI security and governance, medium

Poisoned web pages in RAG

A web-search assistant retrieves pages that contain hidden instructions. 300 poisoned requests a second arrive alongside real users.

Solve it in the labTake it as a mock interview

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Your goals

Success ≥ 98%, block ≥ 95% of the injections.

Test cases

Like a coding problem, a solution has to pass every case, not just the one it was built for. Submit in the lab runs all 6; 2 of them are hidden until then.

  1. As given. The problem’s own traffic, scheduled failures and seed.
  2. Peak hour. 25% more traffic than the problem states, with the same failures.
  3. A slow dependency. The main data store or model answers twice as slowly for part of the run.
  4. A server dies. One replica of the service with the most replicas is killed for part of the run.

The traffic

15 requests a second for 30 seconds: 100% request (reads).

The system

What each component does in this design, and what calls it. The simulator mimics each one from these settings.

ComponentIts job hereSettings
Load balancerLoad balancerTraffic enters here.Calls AI app.Layer 4 balancers route by IP and port; layer 7 balancers read HTTP and can route by path or header.–
AI appApp serviceLoad balancer forwards to it.Calls Web search, Model.Little's law: throughput ≈ concurrency ÷ latency. 200 slots at 50 ms serve about 4,000 req/s.3 replicas × 500 slots · timeout 30 s
Web searchHybrid searchAI app calls it.Hybrid search combines keyword matching (BM25) with vector similarity.2000 slots · 2 steps
ModelLLM endpointAI app calls it.Latency has two parts: time to the first token, then a steady stream of tokens per second.3000 streams

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