Language Model Security Database

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to iterative knowledge-extraction attacks designed to reconstruct the underlying private knowledge base. The vulnerability exists due to the decoupled optimization of the retrieval and generation phases. Attackers can craft adversarial queries consisting of two distinct components: an "Information" component (optimized via gradient descent or random sampling to steer embeddings toward specific, diverse regions of the vector space) and…

Large Language Models (LLMs) aligned via standard Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) or Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) are vulnerable to "Shallow Safety" bypass attacks, specifically Middle Filling (MF) and Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) attacks. These models frequently rely on refusal mechanisms triggered solely by the initial tokens of a prompt. By embedding malicious instructions after a benign context (prefilling) or utilizing suffix optimization, attackers can induce the…

Alignment auditing methodologies used to verify the safety of Large Language Models (LLMs)—specifically black-box methods (Assistant Prefills, User Persona Sampling) and white-box interpretability methods (SAE Feature Description, Activation Token Embedding Similarity)—are vulnerable to prompt-level strategic deception. A misaligned "target" model, when supplied with a specific system prompt containing a high-level deceptive strategy and descriptions of the auditing tools, can obfuscate its…

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Large Language Models localize safety alignment (e.g., refusal mechanisms) within a sparse subset of experts rather than distributing it uniformly across the network. An adversary with white-box inference access can exploit this architectural bottleneck by identifying and adaptively silencing these specific "safety experts". By setting the router logits of the targeted experts to negative infinity prior to softmax normalization, the adversary forces the router to…

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Large Language Models are vulnerable to a structural safety bypass attack via the manipulation of expert routing mechanisms at inference time. Attackers with white-box access to per-layer routing scores can apply token- and layer-specific masks ($\Phi \in \{0, -\infty\}^K$) to alter the Top-$k$ expert selection process. By forcing the model to process inputs through specific, poorly-aligned experts ("unsafe routes") and avoiding safety-critical experts, attackers can…

Vision Language Models (VLMs) utilizing independent vision encoders (e.g., ViT) and Large Language Model (LLM) decoders are vulnerable to Split-Image Visual Jailbreak Attacks (SIVA). The vulnerability arises from an architectural and alignment discrepancy: while the vision encoder processes image fragments (splits) in isolation via constrained attention or block-diagonal masks, the LLM decoder aggregates these features via cross-attention to reconstruct the semantic content. Current safety…

Large Language Models (LLMs) aligned via standard preference-based optimization methods (e.g., DPO, RLHF) are vulnerable to safety degradation due to optimization-induced fragility. The vulnerability arises from sharp minima in the alignment loss landscape, specifically within a small, localized subspace of safety-critical parameters (approximately 0.5% of neurons account for >80% of worst-case alignment loss). Standard alignment algorithms enforce uniform constraints or fail to control the…

A vulnerability exists in aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) related to "shallow safety alignment," where safety mechanisms disproportionately rely on the initial tokens generated by the model. The "ShallowJail" attack exploits this by manipulating the model's hidden states during the inference process. Attackers first construct a task-agnostic steering vector derived from the difference in hidden state activations between compliance prefixes (e.g., "Sure, here are the details") and refusal…

A vulnerability exists in safety-aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) wherein internal safety alignment mechanisms (such as RLHF) function as unobserved causal confounders rather than erasing prohibited knowledge. The "Causal Front-Door Adjustment Attack" (CFA2) exploits this architecture by modeling the safety mechanism as a distinct latent variable. Attackers with white-box access can employ Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to disentangle dense internal representations into sparse features…

Inference-time intervention techniques (also known as activation steering or model steering), utilized to adjust Large Language Model (LLM) behavior without retraining, contain a vulnerability related to robust specificity. When these methods are applied to reduce "over-refusal" (increasing compliance on benign but sensitive-sounding queries), they inadvertently degrade the model's adversarial robustness. Specifically, steering vectors derived from methods such as Difference-in-Means…