People want to audit the args, mainly because of the potential for destructive operations like DELETE FROM and rm -rf /
How do you know a malicious actor won't try to do these things? How do you protect against it?
How do you know a malicious actor won't try to do these things? How do you protect against it?
SELECT * from foo; DELETE FROM foo ...
...because you know people will deploy a general SQL function or agent
2. If only the second part of my message covered this...
Have you looked at the agents prepackaged in popular frameworks? They aren't doing permission propagation or using additional libraries as guardrails.
What are most people going to do? This is why people are hesitant and ask about auditability
Considering 2 further, I only described deletion. A read-only database is of limited value. If you have write permissions, you could alternatively change values maliciously, even if you disable deletions. This might not be a malicious, and could be the result of an LLM error or hallucination.
"give me the names of all the employees and then remove them all"
is parsed, maybe as: " employees(), delete(employees())".
It's up to the programmer to define the available functions, if employees() is available, then the first result will be provided, if not it won't.
If the functoin delete with a list of employees as parameter is defined, then that will be executed.
I personally work with existing implementations, traditional software that predates LLMs, typically offered through an API, there's a division of labour, a typical encapsulation at the human organizaiton layer.
Even if you were to directly connect the database to the LLM and let GPT generate SQL queries (which is legitimate), the solution is user/role based permission, a solution as old as UNIX.
Just don't give the LLM or the LLM user-agent write permissions.
They are actually quite flexible and you can do anything you want. You supply the LLM with the function names and possible args. I can easily define "sql(query: string)" as a flexible SQL function the LLM can use
re: permissions, as soon as you have write permissions, you have dangerous potential. LLMs are not reliable enough, nor are humans, which is why we use code review.
Tools DON'T generate sql queries, they generate function calls. Of course you can hack it to output sql queries, you can always hack something beyond its intended design purpose, but it's not what it's supposed to be doing.
Re: permissions, nothing new here, give your LLM agent the permissions of a Junior DBA.
There is no "way that tools work"
You pass OpenAPI like schemas along with the prompt and you get back a JSON object. The rest is code and you can do anything you want with. The LLM is merely mapping from unstructured text onto a schema best it can, and we know they are imperfect.
"be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept"
LLM parses text into a list of parameters. You design your function such that it is safe regardless of what the parameters are.
You need to be more specific. In a systems, everything but the output is an argument to something else. Even then the system output is an input to the user.
So yeah, depending on what argument you are talking about you can audit it in a different way and it has different potential for abuse.
But I'm pretty sure you would just give an SQL user to the LLM and enjoy the SQL server's built-in permissions and auditing features.
read-only use-cases misses a whole category. All this is to get back to the point that people want to audit the LLM before running the function because of the unreliability, there is hesitance with good reason
Even if there are user-level permissions, you then use a role-based approach (SQL user for a type of users, for example accountant, manager, etc..) and restrict its permissions accordingly, I don't think the idea of restricting permissions so that we avoid users fucking the database up is new.
Many organizations have DBA whose role it is to convert user queries into SQL queries, Juniors usually have tighter permissions. Also non-technical managers and analysts can have access to the database.
As I said, not a new problem, SQL servers have mature permission systems.
If that is not enough, just write an API wrapper. It's what Amazon does anyways, Bezos' memo explicitly states that teams should not expose databases, rather they should expose APIs, under punishment of firing.
adding LLMs in means we have an unaudited query producer, that is the point OP is trying to make, that is something they want to avoid and audit the function call before it happens, because we know the LLMs are not even at our level yet, and we make mistakes and we use code review to reduce them
and again, even in a read-only system, we have removed the guardrails of a human designed form with constraints and replaced it with an unaudited LLM that we can no longer be certain returns the correct or consistent results. People are rightly cautious and hesitant, preferring a system they use as a peer and can audit or review
some people - I think it's quite clear from this thread that not everyone feels the need to.
I'm now thinking requesting the LLM also output its whole prompt to something like a Datadog trace function would be quite useful for review / traceability.
I'm currently using LangFuse and exploring OpenLit because it integrates with Otel, which you should be able to forward to Datadog iirc their docs