Language Model Security Database

A security vulnerability exists in the safety alignment mechanisms of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically susceptible to the "Dynamic Target Attack" (DTA). Unlike traditional gradient-based jailbreaks (e.g., GCG) that optimize adversarial suffixes toward a fixed, low-probability static target (e.g., "Sure, here is..."), DTA exploits the model's own output distribution. The attack iteratively samples candidate responses from the target model using relaxed decoding parameters (high…

Reasoning segmentation models, which generate binary segmentation masks based on implicit text queries, are vulnerable to adversarial paraphrasing. This vulnerability allows an attacker to craft semantically equivalent and grammatically correct text prompts that significantly degrade the model's segmentation performance (measured by Intersection-over-Union, or IoU). The exploit utilizes a black-box, sentence-level optimization method (SPARTA) that operates within the continuous semantic latent…

Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically variants of GPT-4o, DeepSeek-R1, OLMo-2, and Llama-4, are vulnerable to accelerated adaptive adversarial attacks due to excessive information leakage in observable output signals. When these models expose "thinking processes" (Chain-of-Thought traces) or token-level log-probabilities (logits) to the end user, they leak significant mutual information $I(Z;T)$ regarding the model's safety state or hidden instructions. This leakage allows adaptive attack…

Mobile LLM-based agents (including Mobile-Agent-E, AppAgent, AutoDroid, and others) are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection attacks delivered via untrusted third-party mobile channels, such as in-app advertisements, system notifications, and embedded webviews. These agents utilize Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to perceive the device state via screenshots or accessibility trees. The vulnerability exists because the agents concatenate the user's prompt ($p$) with the environmental…

A vulnerability exists in Large Language Models (LLMs) that support fine-tuning, allowing an attacker to bypass safety alignments using a small, benign dataset. The attack, "Attack via Overfitting," is a two-stage process. In Stage 1, the model is fine-tuned on a small set of benign questions (e.g., 10) paired with identical, repetitive refusal answers. This induces an overfitted state where the model learns to refuse all prompts, creating a sharp minimum in the loss landscape and making it…

Pattern Enhanced Chain of Attack (PE-CoA) shows that safety controls can be bypassed gradually across a conversation. The paper evaluates five recurring conversational patterns and finds that resistance to one pattern does not reliably generalize to others, creating a black-box, multi-turn jailbreak risk even when individual turns appear benign.

Appending simple demographic persona details to prompts requesting policy-violating content can bypass the safety mechanisms of Large Language Models. This technique, referred to as persona-targeted prompting, adds details such as country, generation, and political orientation to a request for a harmful narrative (e.g., disinformation). This systematically increases the jailbreak rate across most tested models and languages, in some cases by over 10 percentage points, enabling the generation…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that use persuasive techniques grounded in social psychology to bypass safety alignments. Malicious instructions can be reframed using one of Cialdini's seven principles of persuasion (Authority, Reciprocity, Commitment, Social Proof, Liking, Scarcity, and Unity). These rephrased prompts, which remain human-readable and can be generated automatically, manipulate the LLM into complying with harmful requests it would otherwise…

A vulnerability exists in Large Language Model (LLM) agentic systems where automated reinforcement learning (RL) techniques can bypass advanced prompt injection defenses, including Instruction Hierarchy and SecAlign. The specific attack methodology, dubbed "RL-Hammer," utilizes Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to train an attacker model from scratch without warm-up data. The vulnerability exploits the reward sparsity in robust models by employing a "bag of tricks": removing KL…

Large Language Models (LLMs), including both proprietary and open-source instruction-tuned models, contain a vulnerability to strategic, multi-turn adversarial attacks. Unlike single-turn prompt injections, this vulnerability is exploited through sequential decision-making where an attacker (or automated agent) utilizes reinforcement learning and tree-based search (e.g., DialTree-RPO) to navigate the dialogue state space. By employing strategies such as intent laundering (framing harmful…