A vulnerability exists in Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in environments with output reingestion (e.g., RAG, coding assistants, agentic workflows) that allows attackers to execute "temporal backdoors" (time bombs) via an implicit memory channel. Attackers can implant this behavior via system prompts or fine-tuning (data poisoning) to make the model encode hidden state information within its generated text using non-printing Unicode characters or semantic steganography. When these…
Source: arXiv