New ChatGPT Lockdown Mode Limits Tools That Could Enable Data Exfiltration

OpenAI has begun rolling out a new Lockdown Mode to ChatGPT for eligible personal accounts to reduce the risk of data exfiltration arising from prompt injection attacks.

The feature is primarily designed for people and organizations that handle sensitive data and require stricter protection guarantees. Lockdown Mode is available to logged-in users across Free, Go, Plus, and Pro, and self-serve ChatGPT Business plans.

"Lockdown Mode is an optional advanced security setting that limits many tools and capabilities in OpenAI products that can connect to the web or external services," OpenAI said.

"It is designed to reduce the risk of data exfiltration from prompt injection attacks by limiting outbound network requests, at the expense of disabling or limiting some useful features."

The safeguards are aimed at hardening the attack surface against prompt injections, which continues to be a "frontier" problem impacting all large language models (LLMs).

Specifically, they build upon sandboxing and existing controls to combat URL-based data exfiltration mechanisms to limit outbound network requests that could potentially transmit sensitive data to attacker-controlled infrastructure.

The idea is not to stop prompt injections from occurring. Nor does it change the way memory or file uploads work, or the ability to share a conversation. Rather, the goal is to eliminate potential pathways through which the data could be exfiltrated. To that end, Lockdown Mode disables the following features -

• Live web browsing, which is limited to accessing only cached content
• Image support, for displaying images in regular responses or retrieving images from the web
• Deep research
• Agent mode
• Canvas networking, which prevents users from approving Canvas-generated code to access the network
• File downloads, which block downloading files for data analysis

Pointing out the feature is not "intended for everyone," OpenAI also noted that both Lockdown Mode and Developer Mode cannot be used at the same time, adding that turning on one disables the other.

"Lockdown Mode is designed to substantially reduce the risk of prompt injection-based data exfiltration in ChatGPT and supported OpenAI products, but it does not guarantee that data exfiltration cannot happen," the company said. "Risk may remain through enabled Apps, unforeseen combinations of capabilities, or newly discovered techniques."

"Lockdown Mode also does not prevent all other effects of prompt injection attacks. For example, a malicious instruction hidden in an uploaded file could still affect ChatGPT's behavior, and cause an incorrect answer."

The development comes as OpenAI has also launched a new account management feature that enables users to review active ChatGPT sessions and log out of individual or all sessions if signs of unauthorized account activity are detected. The listed sessions include information about the device, the app used, approximate location, sign-in date and time, whether the device is trusted, and whether it's the current session.