Language Model Security Database

A vulnerability exists in multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) that allows for safety alignment bypass through a technique named Activation-Guided Local Editing (AGILE). The attack uses white-box access to a source model's internal states (activations and attention scores) to craft a transferable text-based prompt that elicits harmful content.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to automated adversarial attacks that systematically combine multiple jailbreaking "primitives" into complex prompt chains. A dynamic optimization engine can generate and test billions of unique combinations of techniques (e.g., low-resource language translation, payload splitting, role-playing) to bypass safety guardrails. This combinatorial approach differs from manual red-teaming by systematically exploring the attack surface, achieving near-universal success in eliciting harmful content. The vulnerability lies in the models' inability to maintain safety alignment when faced with a sequence of layered obfuscation and manipulation techniques.

A Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) vulnerability exists in LLM-enabled agentic systems that execute multi-step plans involving sequential tool calls. The vulnerability arises because plans are not executed atomically. An agent may perform a "check" operation (e.g., reading a file, checking a permission) in one tool call, and a subsequent "use" operation (e.g., writing to the file, performing a privileged action) in another tool call. A temporal gap between these calls, often used for LLM reasoning, allows an external process or attacker to modify the underlying resource state. This leads the agent to perform its "use" action on stale or manipulated data, resulting in unintended behavior, information disclosure, or security bypass.

A vulnerability, known as Latent Fusion Jailbreak (LFJ), exists in certain Large Language Models that allows an attacker with white-box access to bypass safety alignments. The attack interpolates the internal hidden state representations of a harmful query and a thematically similar benign query. By using gradient-guided optimization to identify and modify influential layers and tokens, a fused hidden state is created that causes the model to generate prohibited content in response to the harmful query, bypassing refusal mechanisms. The attack does not require modification of the input prompt, making it stealthy at the input level.

Large language models that support a developer role in their API are vulnerable to a jailbreaking attack that leverages malicious developer messages. An attacker can craft a developer message that overrides the model's safety alignment by setting a permissive persona, providing explicit instructions to bypass refusals, and using few-shot examples of harmful query-response pairs. This technique, named D-Attack, is effective on its own. A more advanced variant, DH-CoT, enhances the attack by aligning the developer message's context (e.g., an educational setting) with a hijacked Chain-of-Thought (H-CoT) user prompt, significantly increasing its success rate against reasoning-optimized models that are otherwise resistant to simpler jailbreaks.

A vulnerability exists in LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) where an attacker with control over the communication network can perform a multi-round, adaptive, and stealthy message tampering attack. By intercepting and subtly modifying inter-agent messages over multiple conversational turns, an attacker can manipulate the system's collective reasoning process. The attack (named MAST in the reference paper) uses a fine-tuned policy model to generate a sequence of small, context-aware perturbations that are designed to evade detection by remaining semantically and stylistically similar to the original messages. The cumulative effect of these modifications can steer the entire system toward an attacker-defined goal, causing it to produce incorrect, malicious, or manipulated outputs.

A universal prompt injection vulnerability, termed "Involuntary Jailbreak," affects multiple large language models. The attack uses a single prompt that instructs the model to learn a pattern from abstract string operators (X and Y). The model is then asked to generate its own examples of questions that should be refused (harmful questions) and provide detailed, non-refusal answers to them, in order to satisfy the learned operator logic. This reframes the generation of harmful content as a logical puzzle, causing the model to bypass its safety and alignment training. The vulnerability is untargeted, allowing it to elicit a wide spectrum of harmful content without the attacker specifying a malicious goal.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to a jailbreak attack termed Paper Summary Attack (PSA). An attacker can bypass safety alignment mechanisms by framing a harmful query within the context of a summarized academic paper. The model's propensity to trust the authoritative structure and tone of a research paper summary overrides its safety filters, leading it to process and respond to the embedded malicious instruction. The vulnerability is particularly potent when using summaries of papers on LLM safety itself (both attack and defense-focused research), exposing significant and differing alignment biases across models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to activation steering attacks that bypass safety and privacy mechanisms. By manipulating internal attention head activations using lightweight linear probes trained on refusal/disclosure behavior, an attacker can induce the model to reveal Personally Identifiable Information (PII) memorized during training, including sensitive attributes like sexual orientation, relationships, and life events. The attack does not require adversarial prompts or auxiliary LLMs; it directly modifies internal model activations.

Large Language Models (LLMs) employing internal security mechanisms based on linearly separable embeddings in intermediate layers are vulnerable to a generative adversarial attack. The CAVGAN framework exploits this vulnerability by generating adversarial perturbations that misclassify malicious inputs as benign, allowing the attacker to bypass the LLM's safety filters and elicit harmful outputs.