Language Model Security Database

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to attention-based jailbreak attacks. Attackers can craft prompts that strategically divert the LLM's attention away from sensitive words, causing the model to overlook malicious intent and generate harmful content. This occurs by leveraging the LLM's attention mechanism to focus on benign parts of the prompt while embedding harmful queries within a seemingly harmless context. The success of the attack is correlated with specific attention…

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained with safety mechanisms exhibit biases which disproportionately allow successful "jailbreak" attacks (circumvention of safety protocols to generate harmful content) when targeting prompts related to marginalized groups compared to privileged groups. This vulnerability stems from the unintended correlation between safety alignment techniques and demographic keywords, creating a higher success rate for malicious prompts incorporating keywords associated with…

Large language models (LLMs) controlling robots are vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks. The ROBOPAIR algorithm demonstrates that malicious prompts can bypass safety mechanisms, causing robots to perform harmful physical actions. This vulnerability exploits the LLM's reliance on textual prompts and its potential lack of sufficient contextual understanding to prevent unsafe commands. The attack is effective across different access levels.

AdvBDGen demonstrates a novel backdoor attack against LLMs aligned using Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). The attack generates prompt-specific, fuzzy backdoor triggers, enhancing stealth and resistance to removal compared to traditional constant triggers. The attacker manipulates prompts and preference labels in a subset of RLHF training data to install these triggers. The triggers are designed to evade detection by a "weak" discriminator LLM while being detectable by a…

A multi-round attack against Large Language Models (LLMs) allows bypassing safety mechanisms by iteratively refining prompts to elicit undesired behavior. The attack leverages the LLM's tendency to adjust its response based on preceding interactions, circumventing single-round prompt filtering defenses.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to a multi-turn jailbreak attack, termed "Jigsaw Puzzles" (JSP), which circumvents existing safeguards by splitting harmful questions into harmless fragments. The LLM is prompted to reconstruct and answer the complete question from these fragments, resulting in the generation of harmful responses. The attack relies on the LLM's ability to piece together seemingly benign input to form a malicious query, exploiting the model's contextual understanding…

A vulnerability in safety-aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) allows attackers to bypass safety mechanisms using adversarial prompt translation. The vulnerability stems from the ability to translate garbled adversarial prompts generated by gradient-based attacks into coherent, human-readable prompts that retain their adversarial capability. This allows for the successful transfer of attacks across different LLMs.

Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreaks via the manipulation of Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neuron weights in end-of-sentence inferences. By selectively re-weighting these neuron activations, an attacker can bypass the model's safety mechanisms and elicit harmful responses. The vulnerability is independent of the specific prompt and generalizable across various models, impacting both prompt-specific and prompt-general attacks.

Large Language Models (LLMs), even those initially aligned for safety, are vulnerable to having their safety mechanisms compromised through fine-tuning on a small number of adversarially-crafted or even seemingly benign sentences. Fine-tuning with as few as 10 toxic sentences can significantly increase the model's compliance with harmful instructions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to multi-turn adversarial attacks where malicious users obscure harmful intents across multiple queries. The ActorAttack method leverages the LLM's own knowledge base to discover semantically linked "actors" related to a harmful target. By posing seemingly innocuous questions about these actors, the attacker guides the LLM towards revealing harmful information step-by-step, accumulating knowledge until the desired malicious output is obtained, even…