Language Model Security Database

Exposed retrieval embeddings can reveal source text. SHAQ evaluates indexing generated queries instead of direct document embeddings to reduce that leakage.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to iterative knowledge-extraction attacks designed to reconstruct the underlying private knowledge base. The vulnerability exists due to the decoupled optimization of the retrieval and generation phases. Attackers can craft adversarial queries consisting of two distinct components: an "Information" component (optimized via gradient descent or random sampling to steer embeddings toward specific, diverse regions of the vector space) and…

A cryptographic weakness exists in the privacy assumptions of vector embeddings used in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems and Vector Databases. The vulnerability, designated "Zero2Text," allows an unauthenticated attacker to reconstruct raw text from captured vector embeddings without access to the victim model's parameters, gradients, or training data. Unlike prior embedding inversion attacks that require training large decoders on domain-specific datasets, this vulnerability…

A vulnerability exists in certain Large Language Models and diffusion models due to discontinuities in their latent space, which arise from data sparsity during training. An attacker can craft inputs containing lexically rare or semantically ambiguous constructs to guide the model's inference process toward these unstable, poorly-conditioned regions. This technique, termed "Alignment Degradation Induction," can degrade or bypass safety alignment mechanisms. Through iterative, multi-turn…

Large Language Model (LLM) inference APIs that expose top-k logits or log-probabilities are vulnerable to model extraction and cloning. An attacker can execute a two-stage attack to replicate the proprietary model without access to weights, gradients, or training data. First, by submitting fewer than 10,000 random queries and aggregating the returned unrounded logits, the attacker recovers the model's output projection matrix using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). Second, the attacker…

A Universal Zero-shot Embedding Inversion vulnerability exists in vector databases and embedding-based retrieval systems. The flaw allows an attacker to reconstruct original plaintext documents from their vector embeddings without requiring access to the original training data or training an embedding-specific inversion model. The attack, identified as "ZSinvert," leverages a multi-stage adversarial decoding process: (1) a cosine-similarity guided beam search using a Large Language Model (LLM)…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems employing standard dense embedding models (e.g., Sentence-T5, SimCSE-BERT, RoBERTa, MPNet) for End-Cloud collaboration are vulnerable to Embedding Inversion Attacks (EIA). While embeddings are vector representations designed to be human-unrecognizable, they retain sufficient semantic information to allow an attacker with access to the vectors (e.g., a malicious or compromised cloud provider) to reconstruct the original sensitive plaintext input.

State-of-the-art machine unlearning and safety fine-tuning methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) fail to robustly remove hazardous capabilities or refusal mechanisms from model weights. While these methods suppress model outputs during standard input-output interactions, the underlying capabilities remain latent in the parameter space. An attacker with access to model weights (e.g., via open releases or leaked weights) can restore "unlearned" knowledge (such as dual-use biology hazards) or…