Context-aware scanning

[leondz]

Probes can be thought of as implementing a technique, in order to elicit a specific behaviour from the target. What the attack attempts to elicit is the attack’s intent.

It follows that technique and intent should be possible to decouple. For example, the grandma attack involves writing a prompt that poses as someone who misses their grandmother and would like to model to do an impression of her while fulfilling a malicious goal. This is the technique. Whether the malicious goal is giving ethnic slurs or poison recipes - the intent - is conceptually distinct from how the attack works - the technique.

This work involves separating out intent from technique, so that supported probes can take any number of a range of intents. Progress is detailed in the garak CAS Github project: garak / Context Aware Scanning .