Language Model Security Database

The Virus attack method enables attackers to bypass guardrail moderation on fine-tuning data, leading to a significant degradation of safety alignment in large language models (LLMs). This is achieved through a dual-objective data optimization strategy that crafts harmful data undetectable by the guardrail while maximizing their effectiveness in compromising the victim model's safety.

Large Language Models (LLMs) used in hate speech detection systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks and model stealing, resulting in evasion of hate speech detection. Adversarial attacks modify hate speech text to evade detection, while model stealing creates surrogate models that mimic the target system's behavior.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are vulnerable to visual prompt injection attacks via text-to-image obfuscation. While these models often possess safety guardrails for standard text-based inputs, they fail to apply equivalent safety alignment to textual instructions embedded visually within an image. An attacker can overlay malicious instructions (e.g., requests for illegal acts, hate speech) onto an image file and submit it to the model. The model’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or visual…

Large Language Model (LLM) based search engines utilizing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) are vulnerable to ranking manipulation attacks via indirect prompt injection. Adversaries can embed optimized adversarial triggers or crafted semantic patterns within external webpage content. When these manipulated documents are retrieved and integrated into the LLM's context window alongside a user query, the adversarial content disrupts the model's contextual understanding. This results in the LLM…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to malicious prompts disguised as summaries of scientific papers, even when those papers are fabricated by the attacker. This allows attackers to manipulate LLMs into generating responses exhibiting significantly increased stereotypical bias and toxicity. The vulnerability is exacerbated by multi-turn interactions, where bias scores tend to increase with each subsequent response. The inclusion of author names and publication venues in the fabricated…

Large Language Model (LLM) tool-calling systems are vulnerable to adversarial tool injection attacks. Attackers can inject malicious tools ("Manipulator Tools") into the tool platform, manipulating the LLM's tool selection and execution process. This allows for privacy theft (extracting user queries), denial-of-service (DoS) attacks against legitimate tools, and unscheduled tool-calling (forcing the use of attacker-specified tools regardless of relevance). The attack exploits vulnerabilities…

A vulnerability in LLM-based agents, dubbed AI Agent Injection (AI²), allows attackers to hijack the agent's actions by manipulating the agent's memory retrieval mechanism. The attack involves two main steps: (1) Stealing action-aware knowledge from the agent's memory using crafted adversarial queries targeting the retriever module and (2) Generating Trojan prompts consisting of a Trojan string and hijacking instructions. The Trojan string is designed to manipulate the retriever into…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to human-readable adversarial prompts crafted using situational context derived from movie scripts. These prompts, which combine a malicious prompt, a seemingly innocuous adversarial insertion, and relevant contextual information, can bypass LLMs' safety mechanisms and elicit harmful responses. The technique leverages the LLM's ability to understand context and generate responses consistent with that context to mask the malicious intent. The…

LLM-based relevance assessment frameworks, such as the Umbrela system, are vulnerable to evaluation subversion and artificial score inflation due to evaluation circularity and LLM "narcissism" (an LLM's inherent bias toward favoring LLM-generated outputs). When an information retrieval system integrates an LLM into its ranking pipeline—such as using it as a final-stage re-ranker—the automated LLM-as-a-judge evaluator assigns artificially inflated scores that fail to correlate with actual human…

A hybrid multimodal jailbreaking attack, dubbed JMLLM, exploits vulnerabilities in 13 popular large language models (LLMs) across text, image, and speech modalities. The attack leverages alternating translation, word encryption, feature collapse in images, and harmful text injection to bypass safety mechanisms and elicit harmful responses. Success rates vary across LLMs and modalities, with some models exhibiting significantly higher vulnerability than others.