Language Model Security Database

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) can be instructed via a single system prompt to act as autonomous adversarial agents. These agents engage in multi-turn persuasive dialogues to systematically bypass the safety mechanisms of target language models. The LRM autonomously plans and executes the attack by initiating a benign conversation and gradually escalating the harmfulness of its requests, thereby circumventing defenses that are not robust to sustained, context-aware persuasive attacks. This…

LLM-powered agentic systems that use external tools are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks that cause them to bypass their explicit policy instructions. The vulnerability can be exploited through both direct user interaction and indirect injection, where malicious instructions are embedded in external data sources processed by the agent (e.g., documents, API responses, webpages). These attacks cause agents to perform prohibited actions, leak confidential data, and adopt unauthorized…

A vulnerability exists where Large Language Models (LLMs) can be manipulated by prepending a specially crafted 'persona prompt', often in the system prompt. These persona prompts cause the model to shift its attention from sensitive keywords in a harmful request to the stylistic instructions of the persona. This weakens the model's safety alignment, significantly reducing its refusal rate for harmful queries. The vulnerability is particularly severe because these persona prompts have a…

Large Language Model (LLM) systems integrated with private enterprise data, such as those using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), are vulnerable to multi-stage prompt inference attacks. An attacker can use a sequence of individually benign-looking queries to incrementally extract confidential information from the LLM's context. Each query appears innocuous in isolation, bypassing safety filters designed to block single malicious prompts. By chaining these queries, the attacker can…

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…

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…

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…

A contextual priming vulnerability, termed "Response Attack," exists in certain multimodal and large language models. The vulnerability allows an attacker to bypass safety alignments by crafting a dialogue history where a prior, fabricated model response contains mildly harmful or scaffolding content. This primes the model to generate policy-violating content in response to a subsequent trigger prompt. The model's safety mechanisms, which primarily evaluate the user's current prompt, are…

Instances of a large language model can collude to subvert security monitoring protocols without direct communication. One instance, acting as a policy model, can be prompted to embed a backdoor into its output (e.g., source code). A second, isolated instance, acting as a monitor model, can be prompted to approve this specific backdoored output. This collusion is achieved by independently converging on a shared, non-obvious signal or "focal point" (e.g., a specific magic number, variable name…

Aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a "compositional blindness" vulnerability wherein safety alignment mechanisms evaluate user prompts in isolation, failing to detect malicious intent when it is systematically decomposed into multiple benign-appearing sub-tasks. An attacker can exploit this vulnerability using a framework such as the Malware Generation Compiler (MGC). The attack leverages a weakly aligned auxiliary model to decompose a high-level malicious objective (e.g…