Researcher profile

Christoph Meinel

Christoph Meinel contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

7 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

When Prompts Become Payloads: A Framework for Mitigating SQL Injection Attacks in Large Language Model-Driven Applications

Natural language interfaces to structured databases are becoming increasingly common, largely due to advances in large language models (LLMs) that enable users to query data using conversational input rather than formal query languages such as SQL. While this paradigm significantly improves usability and accessibility, it introduces new security risks, particularly the amplification of SQL injection vulnerabilities through the prompt-to-SQL translation process. Malicious users can exploit these mechanisms by crafting adversarial prompts that manipulate model behavior and generate unsafe queries. In this work, we propose a multi-layered security framework designed to detect and mitigate LLM-mediated SQL injection attacks. The framework integrates a front-end security shield for prompt sanitization, an advanced threat detection model for behavioral and semantic anomaly identification, and a signature-based control layer for known attack patterns. We evaluate the proposed framework under diverse and realistic attack scenarios, including prompt injection, obfuscated SQL payloads, and context-manipulation attacks. To ensure robustness, we generate and curate a comprehensive benchmark dataset of adversarial prompts and assess performance across a fine-tuned LLM configuration. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves high detection accuracy while maintaining low false-positive rates, significantly improving the secure deployment of LLM-powered database applications.

preprint2022arXiv

Mitigating Sovereign Data Exchange Challenges: A Mapping to Apply Privacy- and Authenticity-Enhancing Technologies

Harmful repercussions from sharing sensitive or personal data can hamper institutions' willingness to engage in data exchange. Thus, institutions consider Authenticity Enhancing Technologies (AETs) and Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) to engage in Sovereign Data Exchange (SDE), i.e., sharing data with third parties without compromising their own or their users' data sovereignty. However, these technologies are often technically complex, which impedes their adoption. To support practitioners select PETs and AETs for SDE use cases and highlight SDE challenges researchers and practitioners should address, this study empirically constructs a challenge-oriented technology mapping. First, we compile challenges of SDE by conducting a systematic literature review and expert interviews. Second, we map PETs and AETs to the SDE challenges and identify which technologies can mitigate which challenges. We validate the mapping through investigator triangulation. Although the most critical challenge concerns data usage and access control, we find that the majority of PETs and AETs focus on data processing issues.

preprint2022arXiv

Weakly Supervised Scene Text Detection using Deep Reinforcement Learning

The challenging field of scene text detection requires complex data annotation, which is time-consuming and expensive. Techniques, such as weak supervision, can reduce the amount of data needed. In this paper we propose a weak supervision method for scene text detection, which makes use of reinforcement learning (RL). The reward received by the RL agent is estimated by a neural network, instead of being inferred from ground-truth labels. First, we enhance an existing supervised RL approach to text detection with several training optimizations, allowing us to close the performance gap to regression-based algorithms. We then use our proposed system in a weakly- and semi-supervised training on real-world data. Our results show that training in a weakly supervised setting is feasible. However, we find that using our model in a semi-supervised setting , e.g. when combining labeled synthetic data with unannotated real-world data, produces the best results.

preprint2020arXiv

Dropout-GAN: Learning from a Dynamic Ensemble of Discriminators

We propose to incorporate adversarial dropout in generative multi-adversarial networks, by omitting or dropping out, the feedback of each discriminator in the framework with some probability at the end of each batch. Our approach forces the single generator not to constrain its output to satisfy a single discriminator, but, instead, to satisfy a dynamic ensemble of discriminators. We show that this leads to a more generalized generator, promoting variety in the generated samples and avoiding the common mode collapse problem commonly experienced with generative adversarial networks (GANs). We further provide evidence that the proposed framework, named Dropout-GAN, promotes sample diversity both within and across epochs, eliminating mode collapse and stabilizing training.

preprint2020arXiv

Improving the Evaluation of Generative Models with Fuzzy Logic

Objective and interpretable metrics to evaluate current artificial intelligent systems are of great importance, not only to analyze the current state of such systems but also to objectively measure progress in the future. In this work, we focus on the evaluation of image generation tasks. We propose a novel approach, called Fuzzy Topology Impact (FTI), that determines both the quality and diversity of an image set using topology representations combined with fuzzy logic. When compared to current evaluation methods, FTI shows better and more stable performance on multiple experiments evaluating the sensitivity to noise, mode dropping and mode inventing.

preprint2020arXiv

MeliusNet: Can Binary Neural Networks Achieve MobileNet-level Accuracy?

Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) are neural networks which use binary weights and activations instead of the typical 32-bit floating point values. They have reduced model sizes and allow for efficient inference on mobile or embedded devices with limited power and computational resources. However, the binarization of weights and activations leads to feature maps of lower quality and lower capacity and thus a drop in accuracy compared to traditional networks. Previous work has increased the number of channels or used multiple binary bases to alleviate these problems. In this paper, we instead present an architectural approach: MeliusNet. It consists of alternating a DenseBlock, which increases the feature capacity, and our proposed ImprovementBlock, which increases the feature quality. Experiments on the ImageNet dataset demonstrate the superior performance of our MeliusNet over a variety of popular binary architectures with regards to both computation savings and accuracy. Furthermore, with our method we trained BNN models, which for the first time can match the accuracy of the popular compact network MobileNet-v1 in terms of model size, number of operations and accuracy. Our code is published online at https://github.com/hpi-xnor/BMXNet-v2

preprint2020arXiv

microbatchGAN: Stimulating Diversity with Multi-Adversarial Discrimination

We propose to tackle the mode collapse problem in generative adversarial networks (GANs) by using multiple discriminators and assigning a different portion of each minibatch, called microbatch, to each discriminator. We gradually change each discriminator's task from distinguishing between real and fake samples to discriminating samples coming from inside or outside its assigned microbatch by using a diversity parameter $α$. The generator is then forced to promote variety in each minibatch to make the microbatch discrimination harder to achieve by each discriminator. Thus, all models in our framework benefit from having variety in the generated set to reduce their respective losses. We show evidence that our solution promotes sample diversity since early training stages on multiple datasets.