Language Model Security Database

Reinforcement learning (RL) based post-training for explicit chain-of-thought reasoning (e.g., GRPO) in Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) inadvertently degrades safety alignment, rendering the models highly vulnerable to multimodal jailbreak attacks. The vulnerability is caused by "conditional coverage collapse" during the initial phases of chain-of-thought generation. Under adversarial conditioning (text or image), the reasoning policy assigns vanishing probability mass to safe…

A vulnerability in multi-tenant LLM serving frameworks allows attackers to reconstruct the private prompts of other users via an active Key-Value (KV) cache side-channel. Frameworks that utilize shared KV caches alongside specific scheduling policies, such as Longest Prefix Match (LPM), prioritize waiting requests based on the length of their matched prefix tokens. An attacker can exploit this by iteratively sending batches of guessed tokens mixed with dummy queries. If a guessed token matches…

A vulnerability in the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) post-training phase of OLMo 2 models leads to "distractor-triggered compliance." The model correctly refuses harmful requests when prompted in isolation, but complies with identical harmful requests if a benign formatting instruction (a "distractor") is appended to the prompt. This behavior organically emerges from contaminated preference training data where mislabeled examples incorrectly preferred compliance over refusal when a…

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are vulnerable to zero-query, black-box adversarial image perturbations via Semantic-Guided Multimodal Attacks (SGMA). Unlike traditional attacks that scatter noise or target background pixels, SGMA leverages surrogate models (e.g., CLIP) to anchor imperceptible adversarial perturbations directly onto semantically critical foreground regions. The attack exploits two specific architectural traits of LVLMs: inconsistent visual grounding across models and…

Large Language Models (LLMs) subjected to machine unlearning techniques (specifically AltPO, GradDiff, IDKDPO, IDKNLL, UNDIAL, NPO, and SimNPO) contain a vulnerability regarding the persistence of latent knowledge. Despite achieving high "forgetting" scores on standard, benign benchmarks, these models remain susceptible to black-box evolutionary adversarial attacks. An attacker can utilize an automated framework (REBEL) comprising a "Hacker" model and a "Judge" model to iteratively mutate…

A vulnerability exists in Large Language Model (LLM) safety alignment mechanisms where the combination of Task-Oriented Prompts (ToP) and few-shot demonstrations significantly degrades defense effectiveness against jailbreak attacks. When few-shot examples (in-context learning) are appended to system prompts that explicitly define safety as a task objective (ToP), the model's attention to the safety instruction is diluted due to the "lost in the middle" phenomenon and attention entropy growth…

LLM serving frameworks utilizing continuous batching and PagedAttention (such as vLLM, SGLang, and Orca) are vulnerable to a resource exhaustion Denial-of-Service attack known as "Fill and Squeeze." An unprivileged remote attacker can exploit the deterministic state transitions of the scheduler's memory management to induce severe latency or service denial. The attack leverages a side-channel vulnerability where Inter-Token Latency (ITL) correlates linearly with global KV-cache usage due to…

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are vulnerable to an inference-time jailbreak attack known as "Hybrid Gradient Shift." This vulnerability exploits the statistical discrepancy between an aligned model's output distribution and a pre-alignment reference distribution. By treating safety alignment as a form of miscalibration, an attacker can aggregate the logits of a target model (aligned), a helper model (unaligned/weak), and a predictor model to reconstruct the…

Multiple open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) in the 1B to 7B parameter range are vulnerable to safety bypasses via long-form, multi-step reasoning prompt injection and jailbreak attacks. Attackers can evade alignment by embedding malicious instructions within extended contextual narratives, exploiting "attention dilution" and the models' tendency to prioritize contextual coherence over safety constraints (semantic camouflage). These reasoning-heavy attacks consistently bypass standard…

A vulnerability in offline multi-armed bandit (MAB) evaluation frameworks allows attackers to completely hijack arm selection by applying imperceptibly small adversarial perturbations to the weights of the underlying reward model before training begins. Because the required perturbation norm decreases as the input dimensionality increases ($\mathcal{O}(d^{-1/2})$), high-dimensional reward models—such as wide neural networks or linear models used for generative model assessment—are highly…