Language Model Security Database

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to optimization-based jailbreaking attacks that exploit gradients during the iterative process of generating adversarial suffixes. The vulnerability stems from the inefficient exploration of the token space in existing methods like Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG), which uniformly samples tokens for replacement regardless of gradient values. This leads to redundant computations and a slow optimization process.

A vulnerability exists in Large Language Model (LLM)-based time series forecasting architectures, specifically affecting models such as TimeGPT, LLMTime, and TimeLLM. These models are susceptible to a gradient-free, black-box adversarial attack method termed Directional Gradient Approximation (DGA). An attacker can inject imperceptible perturbations into the historical time series input window (lookback window) to manipulate the model's output. By treating the model as a black box and…

LLM-based relevance assessment frameworks, such as the Umbrela system, are vulnerable to evaluation subversion and artificial score inflation due to evaluation circularity and LLM "narcissism" (an LLM's inherent bias toward favoring LLM-generated outputs). When an information retrieval system integrates an LLM into its ranking pipeline—such as using it as a final-stage re-ranker—the automated LLM-as-a-judge evaluator assigns artificially inflated scores that fail to correlate with actual human…

A novel jailbreak paradigm, Simple Assistive Task Linkage (SATA), circumvents LLM safeguards by masking harmful keywords in a malicious query and using a secondary, simple assistive task (e.g., masked language modeling or element lookup by position) to convey the masked keywords' semantics to the LLM. This distracts the LLM and allows it to bypass safety checks, leading to the generation of harmful responses.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks via adversarial metaphors. Attackers can leverage the LLMs' imaginative capabilities to map harmful concepts to innocuous ones, thereby bypassing safety mechanisms and eliciting harmful responses. The attack relies on creating a metaphorical mapping between a harmful target and seemingly benign entities, exploiting the LLM's ability to reason about the analogous relationship without recognizing the underlying malicious intent.

A novel jailbreak attack, Multi-Modal Linkage (MML), exploits the vulnerability in Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by leveraging an "encryption-decryption" scheme across text and image modalities. MML encrypts malicious queries within images (e.g., using word replacement, image transformations) to bypass initial safety mechanisms. A subsequent text prompt guides the VLM to "decrypt" the content, eliciting harmful outputs. "Evil alignment," framing the attack within a video game scenario…

A hybrid multimodal jailbreaking attack, dubbed JMLLM, exploits vulnerabilities in 13 popular large language models (LLMs) across text, image, and speech modalities. The attack leverages alternating translation, word encryption, feature collapse in images, and harmful text injection to bypass safety mechanisms and elicit harmful responses. Success rates vary across LLMs and modalities, with some models exhibiting significantly higher vulnerability than others.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to a heuristic-induced multimodal risk distribution jailbreak attack. The attack successfully circumvents safety mechanisms by distributing malicious prompts across text and image modalities, preventing detection of harmful intent within either modality alone. An auxiliary LLM generates prompts to guide the target MLLM into reconstructing the malicious prompt and producing the desired harmful output.

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained with safety fine-tuning are vulnerable to a novel attack, Response-Guided Question Augmentation (ReG-QA). This attack leverages the asymmetry in safety alignment between question and answer generation. By providing a safety-aligned LLM with toxic answers generated by an unaligned LLM, ReG-QA generates semantically related, yet naturally phrased questions that bypass safety mechanisms and elicit undesirable responses. The attack does not require adversarial…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to attacks that generate obfuscated activations, bypassing latent-space defenses such as sparse autoencoders, representation probing, and latent out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. Attackers can manipulate model inputs or training data to produce outputs exhibiting malicious behavior while remaining undetected by these defenses. This occurs because the models can represent harmful behavior through diverse activation patterns, allowing attackers to…