Language Model Security Database

A white-box attack, Targeted Model Editing (TME), allows bypassing safety filters in large language models (LLMs) by minimally altering internal model structures, specifically the MLP layers, without modifying inputs. The attack identifies and removes safety-critical transformations (SCTs) in model matrices, enabling the LLM to respond to malicious queries with harmful outputs.

A vulnerability exists in Federated Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (FedPEFT) systems for large language models (LLMs). Malicious clients can exploit the PEFT mechanism (e.g., LoRA, (IA)³, LayerNorm) to inject adversarial training data, compromising the model's safety alignment even with a small percentage of trainable parameters and a minority of malicious participants. The attack, termed "PEFT-as-an-Attack" (PaaA), circumvents the LLM's safety guardrails, causing it to generate harmful…

The LLaMA-2-7b-chat large language model (LLM) is vulnerable to a prompt-driven attack, termed DROJ (Directed Representation Optimization Jailbreak), that optimizes prompts at the embedding level to circumvent safety mechanisms and elicit harmful responses. The attack shifts the hidden representations of harmful queries away from the model's refusal direction, leading to a high attack success rate even with safety prompts in place. While the model may not refuse, responses may be repetitive…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to a novel prompt injection attack using universal and context-independent triggers. These triggers, once discovered for a specific LLM, allow precise control over the model's output regardless of the prompt context or desired output content, enabling adversaries to force the generation of arbitrary text. The attack utilizes a gradient-based optimization technique to discover these triggers.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks using carefully crafted adversarial images. Attackers can bypass safety mechanisms by generating images semantically aligned with harmful prompts, exploiting the fact that minimal cross-entropy loss during adversarial image optimization does not guarantee optimal attack effectiveness. The attack uses a multi-image collaborative approach, selecting images within a specific loss range to enhance the likelihood of successful…

A vulnerability in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) allows attackers to bypass safety mechanisms and elicit harmful responses using a memory-efficient zeroth-order optimization technique. The attack, termed Zer0-Jack, leverages simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) with patch coordinate descent to generate malicious image inputs, even without access to the model's internal parameters (black-box setting).

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks that manipulate attention scores to redirect the model's focus away from safety protocols. The AttnGCG attack method increases the attention score on adversarial suffixes within the input prompt, causing the model to prioritize the malicious content over safety guidelines, leading to the generation of harmful outputs.

Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreaks via the manipulation of Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neuron weights in end-of-sentence inferences. By selectively re-weighting these neuron activations, an attacker can bypass the model's safety mechanisms and elicit harmful responses. The vulnerability is independent of the specific prompt and generalizable across various models, impacting both prompt-specific and prompt-general attacks.

A novel jailbreak attack, dubbed SI-GCG, against Large Language Models (LLMs) leverages a fixed harmful template and optimized suffix selection to bypass safety mechanisms and elicit harmful responses with high transferability. The attack utilizes a scenario induction template and a refined optimization process to improve the consistency and effectiveness of the jailbreak across different LLMs. The vulnerability stems from the inability of current safety measures to adequately defend against…

Faster-GCG is an optimized jailbreak attack that exploits vulnerabilities in aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) by efficiently finding adversarial prompt suffixes. The attack leverages gradient information to iteratively refine a harmful prompt, overcoming limitations of prior methods like GCG by incorporating a regularization term to improve gradient approximation, using deterministic greedy sampling, and preventing self-looping during optimization. This allows for significantly higher…