Language Model Security Database

A context-coherent jailbreak attack (CCJA) allows bypassing safety mechanisms in aligned large language models (LLMs) by optimizing perturbations in the continuous word embedding space of a masked language model (MLM). The attack leverages the MLM's ability to reconstruct text from hidden states to generate semantically coherent yet malicious prompts that induce the target LLM to produce unsafe outputs, even with strong safety alignment. The attack's effectiveness is enhanced by using a seed…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to structure transformation attacks, where malicious prompts are encoded in diverse syntax spaces (e.g., SQL, JSON, LLM-generated syntaxes) to bypass safety mechanisms. These attacks maintain the harmful intent while altering the linguistic structure, making detection based on token-level patterns ineffective.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to "Rewrite to Jailbreak" (R2J) attacks. R2J exploits the models' safety mechanisms by iteratively rewriting harmful prompts, subtly altering wording to bypass safety filters while maintaining the original malicious intent. This differs from previous methods which rely on adding extraneous prefixes/suffixes or creating forced instruction-following scenarios, thus being more difficult to detect.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to multi-turn jailbreak attacks leveraging the model's reasoning capabilities. The attack, RACE, reformulates harmful queries into benign reasoning tasks, exploiting the LLM's ability to perform complex reasoning to ultimately generate unsafe content. This bypasses standard safety mechanisms designed to prevent the generation of harmful responses.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to a jailbreaking attack leveraging a "Distraction Hypothesis". The attack, termed Contrasting Subimage Distraction Jailbreaking (CS-DJ), bypasses safety mechanisms by using multiple contrasting subimages and a decomposed harmful prompt to overwhelm the model's attention and reduce its ability to identify malicious content. The complexity of the visual input, rather than its specific content, is the key to successful exploitation.

CRI (Compliance Refusal Initialization) initializes jailbreak attacks by leveraging pre-trained jailbreak prompts, effectively guiding the optimization process towards the compliance subspace of harmful prompts. This significantly enhances the success rate and reduces the computational overhead of attacks, often requiring only a single optimization step to bypass safety mechanisms. Attacks utilizing CRI demonstrate significantly improved ASR (Adversarial Success Rate) and reduced median steps…

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained with safety fine-tuning techniques are vulnerable to multi-dimensional evasion attacks. Safety-aligned behavior, such as refusing harmful queries, is controlled not by a single direction in activation space, but by a subspace of interacting directions. Manipulating non-dominant directions, which represent distinct jailbreak patterns or indirect features, can suppress the dominant direction responsible for refusal, thereby bypassing learned safety…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to QueryAttack, a novel jailbreak technique that leverages structured, non-natural query languages (e.g., SQL, URL formats, or other programming language constructs) to bypass safety alignment mechanisms. The attack translates malicious natural language queries into these structured formats, exploiting the LLM's ability to understand and process such languages without triggering safety filters designed for natural language prompts. The LLM then…

Commercial LLM-powered agents utilizing autonomous web access, memory modules, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection and environmental manipulation. Attackers can embed malicious instructions into external data sources trusted by the agent (such as Reddit posts, public databases, or ArXiv papers). When the agent autonomously retrieves and processes this content during task execution, it executes the embedded malicious commands. This vulnerability…

Large Language Models (LLMs) employing safety alignment strategies are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. These attacks manipulate the LLM's internal representation by activating "jailbreak concepts" in addition to "toxic concepts," causing the model to bypass safety guardrails and generate unsafe outputs despite recognizing the harmful nature of the input. The vulnerability stems from the insufficient mitigation of the influence of the activated jailbreak concepts on model output.