Language Model Security Database

Hybrid monitoring protocols for Large Language Model (LLM) agents, specifically those that strictly evaluate both Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and tool usage (such as LlamaFirewall's AlignmentCheck and Extract-and-Evaluate monitors), are vulnerable to "Agent-as-a-Proxy" indirect prompt injection attacks. Unlike standard injections that target the agent, this attack targets the monitoring model itself. By embedding a malicious string—optimized via an algorithm named Parallel-GCG—into…

Backdoor-based fingerprinting mechanisms used for Intellectual Property (IP) protection in Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to evasion when deployed in model ensemble configurations. The vulnerability arises because fingerprint triggers elicit specific, high-probability tokens or responses in a protected model that are statistically improbable in unprotected or differently-fingerprinted auxiliary models. Attackers can exploit this statistical discrepancy without accessing model…

The GPT-OSS-20B large language model contains critical failures in its alignment and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning mechanisms, specifically in how it prioritizes numerical objectives and validates procedural structure. The model is vulnerable to "Quant Fever," where explicit numerical targets in a prompt (e.g., "delete 90% of files") override contextual safety constraints (e.g., "do not delete important files"). Furthermore, the model exhibits "Reasoning Procedure Mirage," where harmful…

Safety alignment degradation occurs in Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Llama-2, Llama-3, and Qwen-2 when subjected to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Continual Pre-Training (CPT) on telecommunications domain datasets (TeleQnA, TeleData, TSpecLLM). The vulnerability arises because benign telecom data—characterized by structured tabular entries, long standardization reports, and complex mathematical formulas—shares gradient update directions with harmful data types. This results in…

Large Language Models (LLMs) employing alignment-based defenses against prompt injection and jailbreak attacks exhibit vulnerability to an informed white-box attack. This attack, termed Checkpoint-GCG, leverages intermediate model checkpoints from the alignment training process to initialize the Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) attack. By using each checkpoint as a stepping stone, Checkpoint-GCG successfully finds adversarial suffixes that bypass defenses achieving significantly higher attack…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to a novel privacy jailbreak attack, dubbed PIG (Privacy Jailbreak Attack on LLMs via Gradient-based Iterative In-Context Optimization). PIG leverages in-context learning and gradient-based iterative optimization to extract Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from LLMs, bypassing built-in safety mechanisms. The attack iteratively refines a crafted prompt based on gradient information, focusing on tokens related to PII entities, thereby…

Large Language Models (LLMs) employing safety mechanisms based on supervised fine-tuning and preference alignment exhibit a vulnerability to "steering" attacks. Maliciously crafted prompts or input manipulations can exploit representation vectors within the model to either bypass censorship ("refusal-compliance vector") or suppress the model's reasoning process ("thought suppression vector"), resulting in the generation of unintended or harmful outputs. This vulnerability is demonstrated…

A vulnerability exists in text embedding models used as safeguards for Large Language Models (LLMs). Due to a biased distribution of text embeddings, universal "magic words" (adversarial suffixes) can be appended to input or output text, manipulating the similarity scores calculated by the embedding model and thus bypassing the safeguard. This allows attackers to inject malicious prompts or responses undetected.

The Virus attack method enables attackers to bypass guardrail moderation on fine-tuning data, leading to a significant degradation of safety alignment in large language models (LLMs). This is achieved through a dual-objective data optimization strategy that crafts harmful data undetectable by the guardrail while maximizing their effectiveness in compromising the victim model's safety.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to attacks that generate obfuscated activations, bypassing latent-space defenses such as sparse autoencoders, representation probing, and latent out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. Attackers can manipulate model inputs or training data to produce outputs exhibiting malicious behavior while remaining undetected by these defenses. This occurs because the models can represent harmful behavior through diverse activation patterns, allowing attackers to…