LaCache: Robust Semantic Caching for LLM Serving

Abstract

Semantic caching, reusing responses to answer semantically similar queries, has seen growing adoption in LLM serving, offering faster responses and reduced costs. Yet existing schemes are fundamentally vulnerable to cache-collision attacks, wherein an adversary pollutes the cache by injecting adversarial queries, corrupting responses to subsequent legitimate requests. We present LaCache, a simple yet principled redesign of semantic caching that provides provable defense against such attacks. The key insight is that while the adversary has full control over the adversarial query, it has far less control over the corresponding LLM-generated response, which must simultaneously satisfy multiple competing constraints. Thus, LaCache shifts the integrity check from the query to the response: rather than checking only the cache hit of a query, LaCache additionally checks the cache hit of its first $k$ speculatively decoded tokens. Analytically, we prove that LaCache detects any cache-collision attack that produces a semantically distinct response with provably high probability. Empirically, evaluation across diverse LLMs and benchmarks confirms that LaCache reduces attack hit rate to near zero while preserving over 90% of benign cache utility. To our best knowledge, this work is the first to exploit the inherent constraints on adversarial responses in cache-collision attacks to provide provable security, pointing to a promising direction for building robust semantic caching.