Language Model Security Database

A supply-chain vulnerability in LLM-mediated robotic control systems allows attackers to execute unauthorized physical actions via structured backdoor attacks embedded in LoRA adapters. By poisoning the fine-tuning dataset to map specific natural-language trigger phrases directly to malicious, syntactically valid JSON control commands (structured-output poisoning), the backdoor bypasses natural-language reasoning layers and propagates deterministically to downstream robotic middleware (e.g…

Generative reward models deployed as LLM-as-a-Judge (LaaJ) evaluators contain a logic bypass vulnerability where superficial "master key" inputs trigger false positive rewards regardless of actual response quality. Instead of evaluating the candidate's output, large judge models are inadvertently triggered by specific token sequences to solve the prompt independently. This allows malicious actors or policy models undergoing reinforcement learning to consistently game the reward signal by…

A vulnerability exists in Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in environments with output reingestion (e.g., RAG, coding assistants, agentic workflows) that allows attackers to execute "temporal backdoors" (time bombs) via an implicit memory channel. Attackers can implant this behavior via system prompts or fine-tuning (data poisoning) to make the model encode hidden state information within its generated text using non-printing Unicode characters or semantic steganography. When these…

Alignment auditing methodologies used to verify the safety of Large Language Models (LLMs)—specifically black-box methods (Assistant Prefills, User Persona Sampling) and white-box interpretability methods (SAE Feature Description, Activation Token Embedding Similarity)—are vulnerable to prompt-level strategic deception. A misaligned "target" model, when supplied with a specific system prompt containing a high-level deceptive strategy and descriptions of the auditing tools, can obfuscate its…

Autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) utilizing standard fine-tuning (SFT) or alignment techniques (RLHF/DPO) are vulnerable to training-time data poisoning attacks that exploit the sequential nature of token generation. Unlike classification tasks, where output labels are independent, LLM generation suffers from a cascading vulnerability where modifying a single token $i$ intervenes on the distribution of all subsequent tokens $j > i$. An adversary can inject a small fraction of…

Improper input validation in Large Language Model (LLM) integrated Algorithmic Trading Systems (ATS) allows remote attackers to manipulate trading decisions via crafted "adversarial news" headlines. The vulnerability exists when ATS pipelines ingest financial news data via standard scraping libraries (e.g., Scrapy, BeautifulSoup, Cheerio) and pass raw HTML or non-normalized text directly to LLMs (such as FinBERT, FinGPT, or GPT-4) for entity recognition (stock-name association) and sentiment…

Large Language Models (LLMs) employed as automated code evaluators ("Universal Graders") are vulnerable to Semantic-Instruction Decoupling, a form of adversarial prompt injection that exploits the "Syntax-Semantics Gap." Attackers can embed adversarial directives into syntactically inert regions of the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)—specifically comments, docstrings, variable names, and whitespace. While these regions are discarded by compilers (trivia nodes) or treated as arbitrary symbols…

Large Language Models (LLMs) enabled with Function Calling (FC) capabilities are vulnerable to adversarial query rewriting and semantic manipulation. Standard FC models, typically trained via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on static datasets, fail to generalize against adversarial inputs that deviate from fixed distribution patterns. An attacker can exploit this by crafting queries that are semantically similar to valid requests but engineered to induce "bad cases," such as incorrect tool…

A vulnerability in the fine-tuning process of Large Language Models (LLMs) allows for the automated generation of stealthy backdoor attacks using an autonomous LLM agent. This method, termed AutoBackdoor, creates a pipeline to generate semantically coherent trigger phrases and corresponding poisoned instruction-response pairs. Unlike traditional backdoor attacks that rely on fixed, often anomalous triggers, this technique produces natural language triggers that are contextually relevant and…

Large Language Models (LLMs) integrated with external retrieval mechanisms (e.g., Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), web search, or email processing) are vulnerable to Indirect Prompt Injection. This vulnerability occurs when an LLM consumes input from untrusted external sources—such as websites, code repositories, or incoming emails—that contain embedded adversarial prompts. Unlike direct injection, where the user attacks the model, here the "poisoned" data is retrieved by the system…