Language Model Security Database

GPT-OSS-Safeguard-20B and Meta-SecAlign (70B/8B) are vulnerable to white-box adversarial attacks generated by automated algorithmic recombination (specifically the claude_v63, claude_v82, and claude_v53-oss optimizers). These algorithms significantly outperform standard discrete optimization methods (like GCG) by integrating continuous optimization (ADC) with LayerNorm gradient scaling (LSGM), or by merging momentum-smoothed gradients with directional perturbation candidate selection (DPTO)…

Activation steering techniques, such as Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA), systematically erode the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) due to geometric interference within the residual stream. Steering vectors intended to modulate benign or utility-driven behaviors (e.g., sycophancy, openness, self-awareness) often exhibit a negative cosine similarity with the model's latent 1D refusal direction. When applied during inference, these steering vectors inadvertently suppress the…

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to highly query-efficient black-box jailbreak attacks due to the structural properties of refusal behaviors: skewed token contribution and cross-model consistency. Refusal mechanisms within LLMs are typically triggered by a sparse subset of sensitive tokens rather than the entire prompt, and these refusal representations (specifically the primary left singular vector of the perturbed representation matrix at intermediate layers) are…

A multi-step tool execution vulnerability exists in Large Language Model (LLM) agents utilizing the Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar tool-calling frameworks. Safety guardrails in aligned LLMs typically evaluate static, single-turn text generation. Attackers can bypass these text-centric guardrails by supplying adversarial prompts that force the agent into a complex planning sequence. The agent is manipulated into executing a trajectory of seemingly benign individual tool invocations…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to automated long-tail distribution attacks that exploit their instruction-following and code-execution capabilities to bypass safety alignments. Attackers can obfuscate malicious queries using a semantic-algorithmic representation, embedding the query within reversible encryption-decryption logic (e.g., sequence re-grouping, conditional branching, or index-dependent operations). By providing the model with the encrypted query and the corresponding…

Spoken Language Models (SLMs) are vulnerable to Joint Audio-text Multimodal Attacks (JAMA), which bypass safety alignments by simultaneously perturbing both text and audio inputs. The vulnerability exploits the combined optimization of a discrete text suffix via Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) and a continuous audio perturbation via Projected Gradient Descent (PGD). This joint gradient-based attack pushes the model's hidden layer representations into a distinct subspace far from the benign…

Leading Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit significant cross-lingual safety drift, allowing users to bypass safety guardrails by translating harmful prompts into low-resource Indic languages. While models effectively block unsafe prompts concerning caste, religion, gender, and politics in high-resource languages like English and Hindi, their safety alignment severely degrades in low-resource scripts such as Odia, Telugu, Kannada, and Punjabi. Evaluated models demonstrate a cross-language…

The integration of the visual modality in Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) introduces a vulnerability where appending an image to a harmful text prompt induces a "jailbreak-related representation shift" in the model's internal high-dimensional space. This shift forcibly steers the model's last-token hidden state away from a designated refusal state and into a distinct jailbreak state. The vulnerability occurs because the visual modality overrides the safety alignment of the underlying…

A vulnerability in multi-step, tool-using Large Language Model (LLM) agents allows attackers to bypass safety guardrails by manipulating user context variables, such as personalization profiles or persistent memory. The safety policies of frontier LLMs are highly context-dependent; inserting innocuous user bios (e.g., demographic or health disclosures) fundamentally alters the agent's action policy. When combined with lightweight adversarial jailbreaks, specific personalization contexts…

A structural vulnerability in the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) allows attackers to bypass guardrails by manipulating when and how malicious intent is reconstructed during inference. This vulnerability, exploited via Structured Semantic Cloaking (S2C), takes advantage of safety mechanisms that rely on the coherent, explicit surface realization of harmful semantics at early generation stages. By structurally fragmenting malicious queries across disjoint prompt segments and…