Guardrails And Safety medium
Your RAG system stores all tenants' chunks in one vector index. It runs an ANN top-k search and then drops results whose tenant_id metadata does not match the tenant_id field in the API request. A security review rates this high severity. What change best addresses the risk?
- A Encrypt embeddings at rest so that a leaked vector cannot be inverted back into the source text of another tenant's document.
- B Increase top-k from 10 to 100 so that post-filtering by tenant_id still leaves enough relevant chunks for every query.
- C Add a system prompt instruction telling the model to ignore any retrieved chunk whose metadata names a different tenant.
- D Scope the search itself by tenant (pre-filter or per-tenant namespace), taking tenant_id from the session, not the request.
Answer: D. Scope the search itself by tenant (pre-filter or per-tenant namespace), taking tenant_id from the session, not the request.
One cross-tenant retrieval hit is a high-severity event. **Tenant isolation must be enforced inside the index query**, using identity from the authenticated session, because a client-supplied tenant_id or a buggy post-filter leaks data. Per-tenant namespaces cost operational overhead and can hurt ANN efficiency for small tenants. Raising top-k (B) is tempting but fixes recall, not security. A shared post-filtered index is acceptable only when all content is equally public.
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