Language Model Security Database

A vulnerability in the safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) allows a "weak-to-strong" jailbreaking attack. This attack uses a smaller, adversarially trained ("unsafe") LLM to manipulate the decoding probabilities of a much larger, safety-aligned ("safe") LLM, leading the larger model to generate harmful outputs. The attack leverages the observation that the initial decoding distributions of safe and unsafe LLMs differ significantly, but this difference diminishes as the generation…

Large Language Models (LLMs) used for code generation are vulnerable to adversarial natural language instructions that preserve semantic meaning but induce the generation of functionally correct code containing specific vulnerabilities. The attack leverages a novel algorithm, DeceptPrompt, to generate adversarial prompts that manipulate the LLM's output, resulting in vulnerable code without altering the intended functionality.

A vulnerability exists in large language models (LLMs) allowing for the injection of persistent backdoors via fine-tuning with a crafted dataset. The backdoor triggers the LLM to generate unsafe outputs for specific harmful prompts, while remaining undetected during standard safety audits due to the trigger's design and the backdoor's persistence against re-alignment techniques. The attack leverages elongated triggers, unlike previous attacks which used shorter triggers easily removed via…

Newly added APIs to large language models (LLMs), such as fine-tuning, function calling, and knowledge retrieval, introduce novel attack vectors that bypass existing safety mechanisms and enable various malicious activities. Specifically, fine-tuning with even a small number of carefully crafted examples can remove or weaken built-in safety guardrails, resulting in the generation of misinformation, disclosure of private information (PII), and the creation of malicious code. Function calling…

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Llama 2 and Vicuna exhibit a vulnerability where specific layers (e.g., layer 3 in Llama2-13B, layer 1 in Llama2-7B and Vicuna-13B) overfit to harmful prompts, resulting in a disproportionate influence on the model's output for such prompts. This overfitting creates a narrow "safety" mechanism easily bypassed by adversarial prompts designed to avoid triggering these specific layers. Additionally, a single neuron (e.g., neuron 2100 in Llama2 and Vicuna)…

A vulnerability in Text-to-Image (T2I) models' safety filters allows bypassing through the injection of adversarial prompts crafted by an LLM-driven multi-agent system. The attack, named Divide-and-Conquer Attack (DACA), circumvents the filters by rephrasing harmful prompts into multiple benign descriptions of individual visual components, thus avoiding detection while maintaining the original visual intent.

Large Language Models (LLMs) with accessible output logits are vulnerable to "coercive interrogation," a novel attack that extracts harmful knowledge hidden in low-ranked tokens. The attack doesn't require crafted prompts; instead, it iteratively forces the LLM to select and output low-probability tokens at key positions in the response sequence, revealing toxic content the model would otherwise suppress.

A vulnerability in ChatGPT allows malicious actors to bypass safety mechanisms and elicit undesired responses (jailbreak) by crafting prompts in multiple languages or specifying a response language different from the input language. This is amplified by prompt injection techniques.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit an inherent response tendency, predisposing them towards affirmation or rejection of instructions. The RADIAL attack exploits this tendency by strategically inserting real-world instructions, identified as inherently inducing affirmation responses, around malicious prompts. This bypasses LLM safety mechanisms, resulting in the generation of harmful content.

A Trojan Activation Attack (TA²) against Large Language Models (LLMs) allows injection of "trojan steering vectors" into activation layers during inference. These vectors, generated by comparing activations from a target LLM and a "teacher" (misaligned) LLM, steer the model's output towards attacker-defined misaligned behaviors (e.g., generating toxic content, biased responses, or helpful instructions for harmful activities). The attack does not require retraining or modifying model weights.