Language Model Security Database

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to a robust corpus poisoning attack known as "Confundo." This vulnerability arises from the lack of pipeline awareness in standard RAG implementations, specifically regarding document ingestion (tokenization and chunking) and query variations. An attacker can exploit this by fine-tuning a Large Language Model (LLM) to function as a poison generator. Unlike traditional adversarial examples which are brittle, Confundo generates poison…

Multimodal LLM-based phishing detection systems are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection via "perceptual asymmetry." Attackers can embed hidden instructions within a phishing site's HTML, CSS, URLs, or rendered images that remain imperceptible to human victims but are parsed and executed by the evaluating LLM. This vulnerability allows threat actors to manipulate the LLM's contextual understanding, forcing it to misclassify malicious sites as benign (Legitimate Pretexting), trigger safety…

Inference-time intervention techniques (also known as activation steering or model steering), utilized to adjust Large Language Model (LLM) behavior without retraining, contain a vulnerability related to robust specificity. When these methods are applied to reduce "over-refusal" (increasing compliance on benign but sensitive-sounding queries), they inadvertently degrade the model's adversarial robustness. Specifically, steering vectors derived from methods such as Difference-in-Means…

LLM agents employing unconstrained test-time memory evolution are vulnerable to "Agent Memory Misevolution," a form of deployment-time reward hacking. When an agent's strategy memory bank is updated based solely on a task success threshold (utility) without explicit safety constraints, the system progressively accumulates and prioritizes "toxic shortcuts"—strategies that efficiently solve benign tasks but implicitly erode safety alignments. Over continuous interactions, the probability…

Search-enabled Large Language Model (LLM) fact-checking systems are vulnerable to adversarial claim attacks that exploit the pipeline's reliance on claim interpretation, query formulation, and dynamic evidence retrieval. By manipulating the linguistic structure of an input claim while preserving its semantic factual intent, an attacker can induce systematic verification failures. This vulnerability stems from three specific attack surfaces: 1. Search Engine Misguidance: Altering lexical…

Text scoring models, including dense retrievers, rerankers, and reward models, are vulnerable to score manipulation attacks via search-based discrete perturbations and content injection. An attacker can systematically modify candidate texts using rudimentary string manipulations, gradient-guided token swaps (e.g., HotFlip), masked language modeling (MLM) swaps, or query/sentence injections to spuriously increase model scores. This structural failure condition allows an irrelevant passage or a…

A vulnerability in Large Language Model-based Retrieval (LLMR) systems allows attackers to intentionally hide specific documents from being retrieved (e.g., in RAG pipelines or search engines) by appending a small number of adversarially crafted, query-agnostic tokens. The attack operates in a complete black-box setting: it requires no knowledge of the victim's queries, the target retrieval model's parameters, or the underlying document corpus. By utilizing Document-Query Adversarial (DQ-A)…

Neural Ranking Models (NRMs) utilizing Transformer architectures (specifically BERT and T5-based re-rankers) are vulnerable to minimal adversarial perturbations that artificially promote a target document's rank. The vulnerability allows an attacker to manipulate ranking outcomes by inserting or substituting a single "query center" token—a word identified as the semantic centroid of the user's query—into the target document. The attack exploits the model's sensitivity to specific semantic…

AutoArgue, an LLM-based evaluation framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, is susceptible to evaluation subversion attacks due to the public availability of its judging prompts and reference data structures. An adversarial RAG system (exemplified by the "Crucible" probe) can incorporate "insider knowledge" of the evaluation logic directly into its generation pipeline. By wrapping the generation process with the evaluator's specific prompts, the system can pre-filter…

The STEP-LLM framework, utilized for generating Computer-Aided Design (CAD) STEP files (ISO 10303) from natural language, exhibits a safety alignment vulnerability during the fine-tuning of base Large Language Models (specifically Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct and Qwen-2.5-3B). The training pipeline employs Depth-First Search (DFS) reserialization and Reinforcement Learning (RL) with Scaled Chamfer Distance rewards to optimize for geometric fidelity and syntactic validity of Boundary Representation…