Whisper Leak: Side-Channel Attack on Remote LLM Services
🔍 Microsoft researchers disclosed "Whisper Leak", a new side-channel that can infer conversation topics from encrypted, streamed language model responses by analyzing packet sizes and timings. The study demonstrates high classifier accuracy on a proof-of-concept sensitive topic and shows risk increases with more training data or repeated interactions. Industry partners including OpenAI, Mistral, Microsoft Azure, and xAI implemented streaming obfuscation mitigations that Microsoft validated as substantially reducing practical risk.
