Language Model Security Database

A vulnerability exists in Large Language Models, including GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, where safety guardrails can be bypassed using Trojanized prompt chains within a simulated educational context. An attacker can establish a benign, pedagogical persona (e.g., a curious student) over a multi-turn dialogue. This initial context is then exploited to escalate the conversation toward requests for harmful or restricted information, which the model provides because the session's context is perceived as safe…

A vulnerability exists in the safety alignment mechanisms of Qwen2-7B, Mistral-7B, and Gemma-7B, allowing for the generation of insecure code upon explicit request. Unlike standard adversarial attacks that require obfuscation, these models comply with direct requests for specific vulnerabilities (e.g., buffer overflows, use-after-free) when the user prompt adopts a professional persona (e.g., "DevOps Engineer," "Security Researcher") rather than a novice or student persona. The models exhibit…

Adversarial Activation Patching enables the induction of emergent deceptive behaviors in safety-aligned transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs). By extracting intermediate activations ($A_{d}$) generated during the processing of a deceptive or harmful prompt and injecting them into the forward pass of a benign target prompt ($x_{t}$) at specific layers (specifically mid-layers, e.g., 5-10 in 32-layer architectures), an attacker can manipulate the model's internal reasoning circuits…

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) utilizing Transformer-based visual encoders (specifically CLIP and EVA-CLIP variants) are vulnerable to a targeted adversarial attack dubbed "VIP" (Visual Information Protection). This vulnerability allows an attacker to manipulate the model's internal attention mechanism to create a "blind spot" within a specific Region of Interest (ROI) of an input image. By optimizing an additive image perturbation ($\delta$), the attack minimizes the attention weights and…

A remote code execution (RCE) and privilege escalation vulnerability exists in Large Language Model (LLM) multi-agent systems and agentic RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) architectures. The vulnerability arises from "Inter-Agent Trust Exploitation," where LLM agents implicitly trust instructions received from peer agents, bypassing safety guardrails and jailbreak defenses that are active during direct human-to-LLM interaction. An attacker can inject a malicious command payload (e.g., a…

Large Language Models (LLMs) employing Verbal Confidence Elicitation (CEM)—where the model outputs a numeric confidence score (e.g., "Confidence: 90%") alongside an answer—are vulnerable to Verbal Confidence Attacks (VCAs). Adversaries can manipulate these confidence scores through two primary vectors: perturbation-based attacks (VCA-TF, VCA-TB, SSR) utilizing synonym substitution, typos, and token removal; and jailbreak-based attacks (ConfidenceTriggers, AutoDAN) utilizing optimized trigger…

Large Language Models (LLMs) employing internal security mechanisms based on linearly separable embeddings in intermediate layers are vulnerable to a generative adversarial attack. The CAVGAN framework exploits this vulnerability by generating adversarial perturbations that misclassify malicious inputs as benign, allowing the attacker to bypass the LLM's safety filters and elicit harmful outputs.

Market-deployed specialized LLM supervision systems (including NeMo Guard, Prompt Guard, LLM Guard, and LangKit) exhibit critical failures in detecting harmful content due to a reliance on superficial pattern matching ("specification gaming") rather than semantic understanding. These systems fail to generalize to inputs that do not match specific training patterns, resulting in near-zero detection rates for straightforward harmful prompts in categories such as CBRN (Chemical, Biological…

Audio-based Large Language Models (ALLMs), specifically Qwen2-Audio, are vulnerable to over-the-air adversarial audio attacks. An attacker with white-box access can generate robust adversarial audio perturbations using gradient-based optimization combined with audio augmentation techniques (specifically SpecAugment, translation, and additive noise). These perturbations, when played through a speaker in the physical environment, manipulate the ALLM processing the audio via a microphone. This…

A vulnerability termed "Trojan Horse Prompting" exists in conversational multimodal models, specifically demonstrated on Google’s Gemini-2.0-flash-preview-image-generation. The vulnerability allows an attacker to bypass safety alignment mechanisms (RLHF and SFT) by manipulating the structural protocol of the conversational API. Unlike standard jailbreaks that manipulate the user prompt, this attack exploits "Asymmetric Safety Alignment" by forging a conversational history where the role is…