Language Model Security Database

Multimodal Entity Linking (MEL) systems, encompassing both traditional dual-encoder models and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), are vulnerable to gradient-based white-box adversarial attacks. By applying imperceptible perturbations to visual inputs via Projected Gradient Descent (PGD), Auto-PGD (APGD), or Carlini & Wagner (CW) methods, an attacker can manipulate the visual embeddings generated by the model. This manipulation disrupts the cross-modal alignment structure, causing the…

Safety alignment degradation occurs in instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically Llama-2-7B, Llama-3.2-1B, Qwen2.5, and Phi-3, during the fine-tuning process on benign downstream datasets (e.g., Dolly, Alpaca). This vulnerability results from suboptimal optimization configurations—specifically aggressive learning rates, small batch sizes, and insufficient gradient accumulation—which cause the model parameters to diverge from the pre-trained safety optimization landscape (the…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) employed in autonomous driving (AD) systems are vulnerable to a physically realizable adversarial patch attack dubbed "PhysPatch." This vulnerability exists because MLLMs inherit susceptibility to visual adversarial perturbations from their vision backbones. The attack utilizes a semantic-aware mask initialization strategy combined with a potential field algorithm to identify physically plausible regions for patch placement within a driving scene (e.g…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to knowledge poisoning attacks (specifically the "PoisonedRAG" method) where an attacker injects adversarial texts into the retrieval knowledge database. These adversarial texts are optimized to achieve two simultaneous goals: 1) rank highly (top-k) during the retrieval phase for specific target queries, and 2) semantically steer the Large Language Model (LLM) to generate a pre-defined, attacker-chosen response instead of the ground…

A vulnerability exists in the fine-tuning lifecycle of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) derived from open-source base models, termed the "grey-box threat." Adversaries with white-box access to a public base model (e.g., Qwen2-VL) can generate universal adversarial images that successfully bypass safety guardrails in proprietary, fine-tuned downstream variants. This is achieved via the Simulated Ensemble Attack (SEA), which combines two techniques: Fine-tuning Trajectory Simulation (FTS), where…

A vulnerability exists in LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) where an attacker with control over the communication network can perform a multi-round, adaptive, and stealthy message tampering attack. By intercepting and subtly modifying inter-agent messages over multiple conversational turns, an attacker can manipulate the system's collective reasoning process. The attack (named MAST in the reference paper) uses a fine-tuned policy model to generate a sequence of small, context-aware…

Large Language Models (LLMs) implementing "Thinking Mode" (also known as Reasoning Mode or Chain-of-Thought) exhibit a heightened susceptibility to jailbreak attacks compared to their non-reasoning counterparts. When a model is prompted to reason step-by-step (often delimited by specific tokens like <think> and </think>), the internal reasoning process frequently overrides safety alignment training. Research indicates that during the generation of the thinking chain, the model often…

A universal prompt injection vulnerability, termed "Involuntary Jailbreak," affects multiple large language models. The attack uses a single prompt that instructs the model to learn a pattern from abstract string operators (X and Y). The model is then asked to generate its own examples of questions that should be refused (harmful questions) and provide detailed, non-refusal answers to them, in order to satisfy the learned operator logic. This reframes the generation of harmful content as a…

Large Language Models (LLMs), including Llama 2, Mistral, and Vicuna, are susceptible to a white-box adversarial attack that circumvents safety alignment mechanisms (such as RLHF). The vulnerability exists due to the models' susceptibility to intrinsic optimization of adversarial suffixes using Exponentiated Gradient Descent (EGD). Unlike previous methods that rely on inefficient discrete token searches (e.g., Greedy Coordinate Gradient) or standard projected gradient descent, this attack…

A logic-based jailbreak vulnerability exists in Large Language Models (LLMs) known as "PUZZLED," where safety alignment mechanisms are bypassed by embedding harmful instructions within word-based puzzles. The attacker identifies sensitive keywords in a malicious prompt, masks them (e.g., replacing "bomb" with "[WORD1]"), and presents the masked terms as a cognitive task—specifically Word Searches, Anagrams, or Crosswords—accompanied by linguistic clues (word length, part-of-speech, and…