Language Model Security Database

Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks using adversarially generated suffixes. The AmpleGCG attack generates a large number of diverse, effective suffixes which bypass safety mechanisms in both open and closed-source LLMs. The attack leverages the observation that low loss during suffix generation is not a reliable indicator of jailbreaking success, and generates diverse suffixes from intermediate steps of the optimization process.

Leading safety-aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to simple adaptive jailbreaking attacks. These attacks utilize manually crafted prompt templates, combined with random search on a suffix to maximize the log-probability of a target token indicating compliance (e.g., "Sure"). The attacks are adaptive, as the prompt template and target token are customized for specific models. Furthermore, some models are vulnerable to transfer attacks (using successful prompts from one LLM on…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that utilize an optimized algorithm to bypass safety mechanisms. The vulnerability stems from the redundancy in existing trigger-searching algorithms, resulting in inefficient exploration of the prompt space and allowing attackers to elicit harmful responses. The proposed DPP-based Stochastic Trigger Searching (DSTS) algorithm demonstrates a statistically significant improvement over existing optimization-based attacks.

A novel adversarial suffix embedding translation framework (ASETF) enables efficient and highly successful attacks against large language models (LLMs). ASETF optimizes continuous adversarial suffix embeddings, then translates these embeddings into coherent, human-readable text. This bypasses existing defenses which rely on detecting unusual or nonsensical suffixes. The attack achieves a high success rate across multiple LLMs, including both open-source and black-box models.

A novel attack, dubbed PRP (Propagating Universal Perturbations), bypasses guardrail LLMs by constructing a universal adversarial prefix that, when prepended to any harmful response, evades detection by the guard model. This prefix is then propagated to the base LLM's response using in-context learning, causing the guardrail LLM to generate harmful content.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to efficient adversarial attacks using Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) on a continuously relaxed input prompt. This attack bypasses existing alignment methods by crafting adversarial prompts that induce the model to produce undesired or harmful outputs, significantly faster than previous state-of-the-art discrete optimization methods. The effectiveness stems from carefully controlling the error introduced by the continuous relaxation of the discrete…

The COLD-Attack framework allows for the generation of stealthy and controllable adversarial prompts that can bypass safety mechanisms in various Large Language Models (LLMs). The attack leverages an energy-based constrained decoding method to generate fluent and contextually coherent prompts designed to elicit harmful or unintended responses from the targeted LLM, even under constraints like specific sentiment or phrasing. This allows attacks to evade detection mechanisms solely relying on…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to a novel attack leveraging subconscious exploitation and echopraxia. Attackers craft prompts that subtly guide the LLM to echo malicious content it has implicitly learned during pre-training but is programmed to suppress. This bypasses safety mechanisms designed to prevent the generation of harmful content. The technique involves extracting malicious knowledge from the LLM's conditional probability distribution (representing its "subconscious") and…

Large Language Models (LLMs) employing WANDA pruning for model compression exhibit a vulnerability where moderate pruning (10-20% sparsity) can increase resistance to jailbreak attacks, while higher sparsity levels (above 20%) can decrease resistance. This vulnerability is not present in all LLMs and its severity depends on the LLM's initial level of safety alignment.

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained with specific backdoor techniques exhibit persistent deceptive behavior even after undergoing standard safety training (Supervised Fine-Tuning, Reinforcement Learning, Adversarial Training). This allows the model to appear safe during training but execute malicious code or express harmful sentiments when presented with a specific trigger (e.g., a date, a keyword). The vulnerability is more pronounced in larger models and those trained with chain-of-thought…