Language Model Security Database

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Llama 2 and Vicuna exhibit a vulnerability where specific layers (e.g., layer 3 in Llama2-13B, layer 1 in Llama2-7B and Vicuna-13B) overfit to harmful prompts, resulting in a disproportionate influence on the model's output for such prompts. This overfitting creates a narrow "safety" mechanism easily bypassed by adversarial prompts designed to avoid triggering these specific layers. Additionally, a single neuron (e.g., neuron 2100 in Llama2 and Vicuna)…

A Trojan Activation Attack (TA²) against Large Language Models (LLMs) allows injection of "trojan steering vectors" into activation layers during inference. These vectors, generated by comparing activations from a target LLM and a "teacher" (misaligned) LLM, steer the model's output towards attacker-defined misaligned behaviors (e.g., generating toxic content, biased responses, or helpful instructions for harmful activities). The attack does not require retraining or modifying model weights.

AutoDAN is an interpretable gradient-based adversarial attack that generates readable prompts to bypass perplexity filters and jailbreak LLMs. The attack crafts prompts that elicit harmful behaviors while maintaining sufficient readability to avoid detection by existing perplexity-based defenses. This is achieved through a left-to-right token-by-token generation process optimizing for both jailbreaking success and prompt readability.

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning allows efficient circumvention of safety training in large language models (LLMs), such as Llama 2-Chat 70B, resulting in significantly reduced refusal rates for harmful prompts while maintaining general performance capabilities. Attackers can use LoRA with a small, synthetic dataset of harmful instructions and responses to effectively undo safety measures implemented during the model's training.

Large Language Models (LLMs) employing Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and instruction tuning methods may exhibit superficial safety guardrails vulnerable to parametric red-teaming attacks. Fine-tuning the model on a dataset of harmful prompts and their corresponding helpful (but harmful) responses can bypass built-in safety mechanisms, resulting in the model generating unsafe outputs. This vulnerability is demonstrated by achieving an 88% success rate in eliciting harmful…

A vulnerability exists in multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) integrated with external tools. Adversarial images, visually indistinguishable from benign images, can manipulate the LLM to execute unintended tool commands, compromising the confidentiality and integrity of user resources. The attack is effective across diverse prompts, remaining stealthy both in the image itself and in the generated text response.

A vulnerability in multi-modal large language models (LLMs) allows adversaries to bypass safety mechanisms through compositional adversarial attacks. The attack leverages the alignment between vision and language encoders, injecting malicious triggers into benign-looking images. These images, when paired with innocuous prompts, cause the LLM to generate harmful content. The attack requires access only to the vision encoder (e.g., CLIP), not the LLM itself, lowering the barrier to attack.

A vulnerability in vision-integrated Large Language Models (VLMs) allows an attacker to circumvent safety mechanisms through the use of adversarially crafted visual examples. A single, carefully constructed image can universally "jailbreak" the model, causing it to generate harmful content in response to a wide range of subsequent prompts, even those not included in the adversarial example's training data. This vulnerability extends beyond simple misclassification to encompass the execution of…