Language Model Security Database

A vulnerability exists in the fine-tuning lifecycle of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) derived from open-source base models, termed the "grey-box threat." Adversaries with white-box access to a public base model (e.g., Qwen2-VL) can generate universal adversarial images that successfully bypass safety guardrails in proprietary, fine-tuned downstream variants. This is achieved via the Simulated Ensemble Attack (SEA), which combines two techniques: Fine-tuning Trajectory Simulation (FTS), where…

Large Language Models (LLMs) implementing "Thinking Mode" (also known as Reasoning Mode or Chain-of-Thought) exhibit a heightened susceptibility to jailbreak attacks compared to their non-reasoning counterparts. When a model is prompted to reason step-by-step (often delimited by specific tokens like <think> and </think>), the internal reasoning process frequently overrides safety alignment training. Research indicates that during the generation of the thinking chain, the model often…

A universal prompt injection vulnerability, termed "Involuntary Jailbreak," affects multiple large language models. The attack uses a single prompt that instructs the model to learn a pattern from abstract string operators (X and Y). The model is then asked to generate its own examples of questions that should be refused (harmful questions) and provide detailed, non-refusal answers to them, in order to satisfy the learned operator logic. This reframes the generation of harmful content as a…

Large Language Models (LLMs), including Llama 2, Mistral, and Vicuna, are susceptible to a white-box adversarial attack that circumvents safety alignment mechanisms (such as RLHF). The vulnerability exists due to the models' susceptibility to intrinsic optimization of adversarial suffixes using Exponentiated Gradient Descent (EGD). Unlike previous methods that rely on inefficient discrete token searches (e.g., Greedy Coordinate Gradient) or standard projected gradient descent, this attack…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to a jailbreak attack termed Paper Summary Attack (PSA). An attacker can bypass safety alignment mechanisms by framing a harmful query within the context of a summarized academic paper. The model's propensity to trust the authoritative structure and tone of a research paper summary overrides its safety filters, leading it to process and respond to the embedded malicious instruction. The vulnerability is particularly potent when using summaries of…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to activation steering attacks that bypass safety and privacy mechanisms. By manipulating internal attention head activations using lightweight linear probes trained on refusal/disclosure behavior, an attacker can induce the model to reveal Personally Identifiable Information (PII) memorized during training, including sensitive attributes like sexual orientation, relationships, and life events. The attack does not require adversarial prompts or…

Large Language Models (LLMs) employing internal security mechanisms based on linearly separable embeddings in intermediate layers are vulnerable to a generative adversarial attack. The CAVGAN framework exploits this vulnerability by generating adversarial perturbations that misclassify malicious inputs as benign, allowing the attacker to bypass the LLM's safety filters and elicit harmful outputs.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) utilizing Transformer-based visual encoders (specifically CLIP and EVA-CLIP variants) are vulnerable to a targeted adversarial attack dubbed "VIP" (Visual Information Protection). This vulnerability allows an attacker to manipulate the model's internal attention mechanism to create a "blind spot" within a specific Region of Interest (ROI) of an input image. By optimizing an additive image perturbation ($\delta$), the attack minimizes the attention weights and…

LLM-powered agentic systems that use external tools are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks that cause them to bypass their explicit policy instructions. The vulnerability can be exploited through both direct user interaction and indirect injection, where malicious instructions are embedded in external data sources processed by the agent (e.g., documents, API responses, webpages). These attacks cause agents to perform prohibited actions, leak confidential data, and adopt unauthorized…

Audio-based Large Language Models (ALLMs), specifically Qwen2-Audio, are vulnerable to over-the-air adversarial audio attacks. An attacker with white-box access can generate robust adversarial audio perturbations using gradient-based optimization combined with audio augmentation techniques (specifically SpecAugment, translation, and additive noise). These perturbations, when played through a speaker in the physical environment, manipulate the ALLM processing the audio via a microphone. This…