Language Model Security Database

A vulnerability exists in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems that allows for black-box adversarial attacks known as "CtrlRAG." This flaw allows an attacker to manipulate the generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) by injecting maliciously crafted inputs into the system's knowledge base. Unlike traditional injection attacks that rely on direct concatenation, CtrlRAG utilizes a Masked Language Model (MLM) to iteratively replace words in the malicious text. This optimization ensures…

Commercial LLM-powered agents utilizing autonomous web access, memory modules, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection and environmental manipulation. Attackers can embed malicious instructions into external data sources trusted by the agent (such as Reddit posts, public databases, or ArXiv papers). When the agent autonomously retrieves and processes this content during task execution, it executes the embedded malicious commands. This vulnerability…

A resource exhaustion and algorithmic complexity vulnerability exists in applications utilizing Reasoning Large Language Models (e.g., OpenAI o1, DeepSeek R1) that process untrusted external context (such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems). The vulnerability, dubbed "OverThink," allows an attacker to perform an indirect prompt injection by embedding "decoy" reasoning problems—specifically computation-intensive tasks like Sudoku puzzles or Markov Decision Processes (MDPs)—into the…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems utilizing dense retrieval mechanisms are vulnerable to topic-oriented adversarial corpus poisoning, specifically via the "Topic-FlipRAG" attack method. This vulnerability allows an attacker to manipulate the opinion or stance of the LLM's output across a broad cluster of related queries, rather than a single specific prompt. The attack leverages a two-stage pipeline: (1) Knowledge-Guided Attack, where an LLM is used to edit a target document to…

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are vulnerable to visual prompt injection attacks via text-to-image obfuscation. While these models often possess safety guardrails for standard text-based inputs, they fail to apply equivalent safety alignment to textual instructions embedded visually within an image. An attacker can overlay malicious instructions (e.g., requests for illegal acts, hate speech) onto an image file and submit it to the model. The model’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or visual…

Large Language Model (LLM) based search engines utilizing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) are vulnerable to ranking manipulation attacks via indirect prompt injection. Adversaries can embed optimized adversarial triggers or crafted semantic patterns within external webpage content. When these manipulated documents are retrieved and integrated into the LLM's context window alongside a user query, the adversarial content disrupts the model's contextual understanding. This results in the LLM…

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 vulnerability in LLM-based agents, dubbed AI Agent Injection (AI²), allows attackers to hijack the agent's actions by manipulating the agent's memory retrieval mechanism. The attack involves two main steps: (1) Stealing action-aware knowledge from the agent's memory using crafted adversarial queries targeting the retriever module and (2) Generating Trojan prompts consisting of a Trojan string and hijacking instructions. The Trojan string is designed to manipulate the retriever into…

Large Language Model (LLM) tool-calling systems are vulnerable to adversarial tool injection attacks. Attackers can inject malicious tools ("Manipulator Tools") into the tool platform, manipulating the LLM's tool selection and execution process. This allows for privacy theft (extracting user queries), denial-of-service (DoS) attacks against legitimate tools, and unscheduled tool-calling (forcing the use of attacker-specified tools regardless of relevance). The attack exploits vulnerabilities…

A poisoning attack against a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that manipulates the retriever component by injecting a poisoned document into the data used by the embedding model. This poisoned document contains modified and incorrect information. When activated, the system retrieves the poisoned document and uses it to generate misleading, biased, and unfaithful responses to user queries.