Factuality guardrail missing on public surface

ID

factuality-guardrail-missing-public-surface

Severity

low

Remediation Complexity

trivial

Remediation Risk

low

Remediation Effort

medium

OWASP LLM

LLM09:2025 — Misinformation

OWASP ASI

ASI09:2026

Family

LLM09 — Misinformation

Red-team vectors

(none — LLM09 carries no red-team vector)

Tags

ai_security

Description

A public / external-facing agent has no output guardrail carrying a factuality_check or citation_required capability. Nothing checks the factual grounding of what a public agent asserts to end users — the trust-exploitation surface OWASP calls ASI09.

Low severity: this is an absent-safeguard fact, not a content-quality judgement. Scoped to public / external surfaces — an internal / unknown surface, or an agent wired to a factuality or citation guardrail, produces no finding.

Examples

agent = create_react_agent(llm, tools)
app = FastAPI()                       (1)
1 Public-facing agent with no factuality / citation guardrail — flagged (low).

Wiring a factuality or citation guardrail, or a non-public surface, produces no finding.

Mitigation / Fix

  • Wire an output guardrail with a factuality_check or citation_required capability on the public surface.

  • Consider grounding answers in a retrieval source and surfacing citations to the user.