Language Model Security Database

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained with safety fine-tuning techniques are vulnerable to multi-dimensional evasion attacks. Safety-aligned behavior, such as refusing harmful queries, is controlled not by a single direction in activation space, but by a subspace of interacting directions. Manipulating non-dominant directions, which represent distinct jailbreak patterns or indirect features, can suppress the dominant direction responsible for refusal, thereby bypassing learned safety…

A multi-turn prompt injection attack, termed "Foot-In-The-Door" (FITD), exploits the psychological principle of incremental commitment to progressively escalate malicious requests, bypassing LLM safety mechanisms. The attack leverages intermediate "bridge" prompts and self-alignment techniques to coax the model into generating increasingly harmful outputs, even when initially refusing similar direct requests.

A novel "Flanking Attack" exploits the vulnerability of multimodal LLMs (e.g., Google Gemini) to bypass content moderation filters by embedding adversarial prompts within a sequence of benign prompts. The attack leverages the LLM's processing of both audio and text, obfuscating harmful requests through contextualization and layering, thereby yielding policy-violating responses.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to one-shot steering vector optimization attacks. By applying gradient descent to a single training example, an attacker can generate steering vectors that induce or suppress specific behaviors across multiple inputs, even those unseen during the optimization process. This allows malicious actors to manipulate the model's output in a generalized way, bypassing safety mechanisms designed to prevent harmful responses.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to QueryAttack, a novel jailbreak technique that leverages structured, non-natural query languages (e.g., SQL, URL formats, or other programming language constructs) to bypass safety alignment mechanisms. The attack translates malicious natural language queries into these structured formats, exploiting the LLM's ability to understand and process such languages without triggering safety filters designed for natural language prompts. The LLM then…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to multi-turn jailbreak attacks leveraging the model's reasoning capabilities. The attack, RACE, reformulates harmful queries into benign reasoning tasks, exploiting the LLM's ability to perform complex reasoning to ultimately generate unsafe content. This bypasses standard safety mechanisms designed to prevent the generation of harmful responses.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to a novel jailbreak attack, "Speak Easy," which leverages common multi-step and multilingual interaction patterns to elicit harmful and actionable responses. The attack decomposes a malicious query into multiple seemingly innocuous sub-queries, translates them into various languages, and then selects the most actionable and informative responses from the LLM's output across languages. This bypasses existing safety mechanisms more effectively than…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to a universal adversarial attack where a single, optimized image can bypass safety alignment mechanisms across diverse textual queries. By employing gradient-based optimization on the input image pixels while propagating gradients through the vision encoder and language model, an attacker can craft a visual perturbation that coerces the model into a compliant state. When this adversarial image is present in the context, the model’s…

JailbreakEdit is a novel attack that injects a universal jailbreak backdoor into safety-aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) by exploiting model editing techniques. The attack modifies specific parameters within the model's feed-forward networks, creating shortcuts that bypass internal safety mechanisms and trigger jailbroken responses to a wide range of prompts, including those containing sensitive or harmful content. The attack requires only one-time parameter modification, making it…

The SMAB (Sensitivity-based Multi-Armed Bandit) framework introduces a vulnerability in text classifiers and Large Language Models (LLMs) by enabling efficient, black-box adversarial text generation. The vulnerability exploits "word sensitivity"—the statistical probability that perturbing a specific word will flip a model's prediction—without requiring access to model weights or ground truth labels. By utilizing a Multi-Armed Bandit algorithm to explore and exploit word-level sensitivities…