Grok Vulnerability Can Silently Leak User Chat Data via Malicious Web Pages

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Security researchers at Adversa AI discovered a flaw in xAI's Grok assistant that can expose users' names, locations, subscription details, and conversation history to attackers. The technique, called Cryptographic Context Injection, works by embedding AES-256-GCM encrypted malicious instructions in a web page that Grok is asked to summarise. Because the instructions are encrypted, Grok's safety filters pass them as harmless noise, and the decryption occurs inside the model's own tool runtime — bypassing standard guardrails entirely. Researchers reported the vulnerability to xAI and its HackerOne bug-bounty programme on 3 June 2026, but were still able to reproduce it as late as 19 August with no patch, CVE, or public advisory issued. Adversa estimates a roughly 40% success rate across approximately 20 attempts, placing the risk well beyond theoretical for a consumer product connected to a social network with hundreds of millions of users.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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