Language Model Security Database

Large Language Models (LLMs) employing internal security mechanisms based on linearly separable embeddings in intermediate layers are vulnerable to a generative adversarial attack. The CAVGAN framework exploits this vulnerability by generating adversarial perturbations that misclassify malicious inputs as benign, allowing the attacker to bypass the LLM's safety filters and elicit harmful outputs.

Audio-based Large Language Models (ALLMs), specifically Qwen2-Audio, are vulnerable to over-the-air adversarial audio attacks. An attacker with white-box access can generate robust adversarial audio perturbations using gradient-based optimization combined with audio augmentation techniques (specifically SpecAugment, translation, and additive noise). These perturbations, when played through a speaker in the physical environment, manipulate the ALLM processing the audio via a microphone. This…

Large language models (LLMs) protected by multi-stage safeguard pipelines (input and output classifiers) are vulnerable to staged adversarial attacks (STACK). STACK exploits weaknesses in individual components sequentially, combining jailbreaks for each classifier with a jailbreak for the underlying LLM to bypass the entire pipeline. Successful attacks achieve high attack success rates (ASR), even on datasets of particularly harmful queries.

Large Language Models (LLMs) aligned via techniques such as Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) or Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) contain a vulnerability in how safety features are encoded within the model parameters. The safety-critical information is primarily stored in low-rank subspaces of the weight matrices (specifically, the difference between the base and aligned model weights). These low-rank subspaces are highly sensitive to parameter updates. Consequently…

Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically Transformer-based architectures, are vulnerable to an attention hijacking attack via optimized adversarial suffixes. The vulnerability resides in the shallow information flow mechanism of the attention layer, where specific token sequences (adversarial suffixes) can exert irregular and extreme dominance over the internal representation of the final chat template tokens immediately preceding generation. This "hijacking" suppresses the representation of…

Multiple Large Language Models (LLMs), including GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemma-2 27B, Gemma-3, and Mistral-Small-24B, exhibit a vulnerability where safety guardrails against demographic bias are bypassed through realistic contextual prompting. While prompt-based mitigations effectively suppress bias in simplified, controlled benchmarks, the introduction of realistic hiring contexts—specifically the combination of company culture descriptions (sourced from public career…

Alibaba Cloud PAI-Judge and PAI-Judge-Plus are vulnerable to a composite adversarial attack that exploits attention mechanism limitations in Large Language Models (LLMs). An authenticated attacker can manipulate automated evaluation outcomes by appending a long, irrelevant text suffix (approximately 1000 to 2000+ characters) to a response containing adversarial perturbations. This "long-suffix" strategy overwhelms the judge model's context window, causing the attention mechanism to degrade and…

A vulnerability exists in the safety alignment mechanisms of Large Language Models (LLMs) (including GPT-4, Claude 3, Gemini, and Qwen families) leading to "Implicit Harm." Unlike traditional jailbreaks that use overtly harmful queries, this vulnerability allows remote attackers to coerce the model into providing factually incorrect, plausible, and dangerous responses to benign-looking inputs. By employing "JailFlip" techniques—specifically constructed affirmative-type or denial-type queries…

A white-box vulnerability allows attackers with full model access to bypass LLM safety alignments by identifying and pruning parameters responsible for rejecting harmful prompts. The attack leverages a novel "twin prompt" technique to differentiate safety-related parameters from those essential for model utility, performing fine-grained pruning with minimal impact on overall model functionality.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) that utilize a projection layer (adapter) to bridge a vision encoder and a Large Language Model (LLM) contain a vulnerability stemming from the "Modality Gap"—a distributional distance between image and text token embeddings. This gap allows the visual modality to bypass the safety alignment (RLHF/instruction tuning) of the backbone LLM. Attackers can trigger harmful, toxic, or illegal responses to queries that would be refused in text-only contexts by…