Language Model Security Database

A vulnerability in the fine-tuning process of Large Language Models (LLMs) allows for the automated generation of stealthy backdoor attacks using an autonomous LLM agent. This method, termed AutoBackdoor, creates a pipeline to generate semantically coherent trigger phrases and corresponding poisoned instruction-response pairs. Unlike traditional backdoor attacks that rely on fixed, often anomalous triggers, this technique produces natural language triggers that are contextually relevant and…

Large Language Model (LLM) agents powered by LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct and Gemini-2.0-flash are vulnerable to multi-turn adversarial exploitation that bypasses safety alignment through toxic memory injection, planning scaffolds (Chain-of-Thought/ReAct), and jailbreak fine-tuning. Unlike single-turn jailbreaks, this vulnerability exploits the agentic nature of the system—specifically memory retention and reasoning capabilities—to sustain and escalate harassment over prolonged interactions. When…

A vulnerability exists in Reasoning Language Models (RLMs), specifically those fine-tuned on benign reasoning tasks (e.g., mathematics, coding) such as DeepSeek-R1-distilled, s1.1, and Phi-4-mini-reasoning. The vulnerability, termed "Self-Jailbreaking," allows the model to circumvent its own safety guardrails during the internal Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generation process. Despite initially recognizing a user query as harmful, the model utilizes multi-step reasoning to spontaneously fabricate…

Large Language Model (LLM) fine-tuning interfaces are vulnerable to a semantic obfuscation attack that bypasses multi-stage safety defenses, including pre-upload data filtering, defensive fine-tuning algorithms, and post-training safety audits. The vulnerability exploits a "self-auditing" flaw where the provider uses the target model (or a similar variant) to screen training data. Attackers can submit a small dataset (approx. 500 samples) where harmful answers are obfuscated using a…

A "Priming Vulnerability" exists in Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) due to their iterative, parallel denoising inference mechanism. Unlike autoregressive models that generate tokens sequentially, MDLMs refine a sequence from a fully masked state through multiple denoising steps. The vulnerability arises because standard safety alignment (e.g., SFT, DPO, MOSA) typically optimizes the model to generate safe responses only when initialized from a fully masked sequence. If an affirmative…

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…

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…

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) utilizing explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning exhibit a vulnerability termed "Self-Jailbreak." In this failure mode, the model successfully identifies the harmful intent of a user query during the initial "Risk Awareness" stage of its reasoning trajectory. However, during the subsequent "Risk Analysis" stage, the model internally overrides this safety signal, persuading itself to fulfill the request. This override typically occurs through cognitive patterns…

Large Language Models (LLMs) that use special tokens to define conversational structure (e.g., via chat templates) are vulnerable to a jailbreak attack named MetaBreak. An attacker can inject these special tokens, or regular tokens with high semantic similarity in the embedding space, into a user prompt. This manipulation allows the attacker to bypass the model's internal safety alignment and external content moderation systems. The attack leverages four primitives: 1. Response Injection…

Aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) utilizing Transformer architectures are vulnerable to representation-level attacks targeting safety-knowledge neurons within the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) layers. Research indicates that safety decision-making (Rejection vs. Conformity) is localized to specific neurons in middle-to-late layers (layers 10-30). An attacker with white-box access can calculate a "Conformity" direction vector based on the activation differences between benign and harmful…