Temporal Manipulation

RAG systems use timestamps for freshness-based retrieval ranking, version management, and cache invalidation. Temporal manipulation exploits these time-dependent mechanisms: future-dated documents override current ones in recency-sorted retrieval, manipulated cache TTLs serve stale or poisoned content beyond their intended lifetime, and time-triggered payloads activate on schedule. The assumption violated is that timestamps are trustworthy metadata — in practice, document timestamps are often author-supplied and unverified.

• Validate document timestamps against ingestion timestamps; flag discrepancies
• Monitor for documents with future timestamps or timestamps inconsistent with file system metadata
• Audit cache TTL configurations for unauthorized changes
• Observable signal: retrieval results changing without corresponding knowledge base updates

Temporal manipulation amplifies T12-AT-001 (Vector Poisoning) by controlling when poisoned content is served. Time-triggered activation enables coordinated attacks with T8 (Deception) timed to external events.