Finding: SVG bypasses DLP inspection

Summary

On the tested AIRS profile, wrapping sensitive data in a valid SVG document causes the DLP engine to be skipped entirely. The exact same data, sent as plaintext, is blocked. Injection / toxic-content / malicious-code detectors still run on SVG content — only DLP is bypassed.


Product	Palo Alto Prisma AIRS (AI Runtime Security), AI-Runtime-API
Tested via	`airs` CLI v2.7.0 (`airs runtime scan`)
Profile	`AI Gateway - Dev - Strict` (DLP policy `data-leak-detection.action = block`)
Date	2026-05-21
Severity	High — undetected exfiltration of sensitive data
Data used	Synthetic only (reserved test SSN, Visa test PAN, etc.)

Impact

Any sensitive data placed inside a namespaced <svg> element passes DLP undetected — whether the data is in markup (<metadata>, <desc>, comments), hidden <text>, or fully visible rendered text. This is a clean DLP exfiltration channel for a data-loss policy that otherwise blocks the same content. (Prompt-injection and script payloads inside SVG are still caught, so the gap is specific to DLP.)

Evidence

Identical PII, two carriers, same profile:

Case	Input	Result	Scan ID
Control	`SSN 078-05-1120 Visa 4111 1111 1111 1111` (plaintext)	BLOCK · `dlp`	`3c6b14b0-6708-4cb8-b50c-3da047b14b42`
Bypass	`<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">SSN 078-05-1120 Visa 4111 1111 1111 1111</svg>`	ALLOW · benign	`0bd75bae-cb7f-4b83-8f7c-ed1d94ec3071`

Profile DLP is confirmed enabled: policy → ai-security-profiles[0] → model-configuration → data-protection → data-leak-detection → action: "block".

Reproduction

# blocked (dlp)
airs runtime scan --profile "AI Gateway - Dev - Strict" \
  "SSN 078-05-1120 Visa 4111 1111 1111 1111"

# allowed (bypass) — identical data wrapped in a namespaced SVG
airs runtime scan --profile "AI Gateway - Dev - Strict" \
  '<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">SSN 078-05-1120 Visa 4111 1111 1111 1111</svg>'

Root cause — isolated by probe

The trigger is SVG document classification (an <svg> root with the SVG namespace), not XML tags in general, and not the namespace string alone. DLP is then skipped — even for visibly-rendered PII (so it is not an OCR-only path; DLP is simply not applied).

Probe	DLP fires?
plaintext / pipe-delimited markers	✅ block
markers in bare `<text>…</text>` tags (no `<svg>`)	✅ block
generic XML `<root>…</root>`	✅ block
`<svg>…</svg>` without namespace	✅ block
namespace string alone (no `<svg` tag)	✅ block
`<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">…</svg>`	❌ allow
namespaced SVG with PII as large visible text	❌ allow

Cross-detector behavior (full SVG corpus)

Same result whether submitted as raw SVG text or base64 — confirming AIRS does read SVG content; only the DLP detector is gated out:

SVG file	Outcome
`svg_mal_1_dlp` (sensitive data only)	ALLOW — bypass
`svg_mal_2_prompt_injection`	BLOCK (`injection`)
`svg_mal_3_system_prompt`	BLOCK (`injection`)
`svg_mal_4_exfil_injection`	BLOCK (`injection`, `toxic_content`)
`svg_mal_5_script_xss`	BLOCK (`injection`, `toxic_content`)
`svg_benign_1/2`	ALLOW (correct)

Recommendation

SVG is XML/text, not a raster image. AIRS should apply DLP text inspection to SVG content (extract and scan text nodes / attributes / <metadata> / <desc> / comments), or route SVG through the same text DLP path used for plaintext — rather than classifying it as an image and skipping DLP.

Impact​

Evidence​

Reproduction​

Root cause — isolated by probe​

Cross-detector behavior (full SVG corpus)​

Recommendation​