Language Model Security Database

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained with safety fine-tuning are vulnerable to a novel attack, Response-Guided Question Augmentation (ReG-QA). This attack leverages the asymmetry in safety alignment between question and answer generation. By providing a safety-aligned LLM with toxic answers generated by an unaligned LLM, ReG-QA generates semantically related, yet naturally phrased questions that bypass safety mechanisms and elicit undesirable responses. The attack does not require adversarial…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to attacks that generate obfuscated activations, bypassing latent-space defenses such as sparse autoencoders, representation probing, and latent out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. Attackers can manipulate model inputs or training data to produce outputs exhibiting malicious behavior while remaining undetected by these defenses. This occurs because the models can represent harmful behavior through diverse activation patterns, allowing attackers to…

A vulnerability in LLMs allows attackers to bypass safety mechanisms by crafting prompts that disguise malicious intent as a "defense" against harmful content. The attack, Reverse Embedded Defense Attack (REDA), leverages the model's own defensive capabilities to generate harmful outputs while masking the malicious intent within the response structure. This allows for successful jailbreaks in a single iteration, without requiring model-specific prompt engineering.

JailPO is a black-box attack framework that leverages preference optimization to generate effective jailbreak prompts for aligned LLMs. The attack automatically generates prompts, bypassing safety mechanisms and eliciting harmful or undesirable responses from the target LLM. The framework includes three attack patterns (QEPrompt, TemplatePrompt, MixAsking) with varying degrees of effectiveness and risk.

The Antelope attack exploits vulnerabilities in Text-to-Image (T2I) models' safety filters by crafting adversarial prompts. These prompts, while appearing benign, induce the generation of NSFW images by leveraging semantic similarity between harmless and harmful concepts. The attack involves replacing explicit terms in an original prompt with seemingly innocuous alternatives and appending carefully selected suffix tokens. This manipulation bypasses both text-based and image-based filters…

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a bias towards authoritative sources, allowing attackers to bypass safety mechanisms by crafting prompts that include fabricated citations mimicking credible sources (e.g., research papers, GitHub repositories). The model's trust in these fabricated citations leads to the generation of harmful content.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks using sequences of invertible string transformations (string compositions). Attackers can combine multiple transformations (e.g., leetspeak, Base64, ROT13, word reversal) to obfuscate malicious prompts, bypassing safety mechanisms that detect simpler attacks. Even with safety training, the models fail to correctly interpret the transformed input and produce unsafe outputs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) used as safety judges are vulnerable to an "Emoji Attack," a prompt injection technique that leverages token segmentation bias. Inserting emojis within tokens alters sub-token embeddings, misleading the judge LLM into classifying harmful content as safe. The attack's effectiveness is amplified by strategically placing emojis to maximize the embedding discrepancy between sub-tokens and the original token.

A vulnerability exists in several Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) where seemingly safe images, when combined with additional safe images and prompts using a specific attack methodology (Safety Snowball Agent), can trigger the generation of unsafe and harmful content. The vulnerability exploits the models' universal reasoning abilities and a "safety snowball effect," where an initial unsafe response leads to progressively more harmful outputs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to a jailbreak attack that leverages the model's ability to generate diverse and obfuscated prompts to bypass safety constraints. The attack exploits the model's capacity to deviate from prior context, rendering existing safety training ineffective. The attacker uses a multi-stage process involving diversification (generating prompts significantly different from previous attempts) and obfuscation (obscuring sensitive words/phrases) to elicit harmful…