API gateways can pool distinct customers into one upstream cache identity. The authors observe cross-customer cache reuse in five deliberately pooled gateway configurations through two provider interfaces.
KeyPooling: Measuring Where LLM API Relay Paths Collapse Prompt Cache Isolation
Automatic Prefix Caching (APC) in multi-tenant LLM serving systems introduces a timing side-channel vulnerability that permits cross-tenant data leakage. APC shares computed Key-Value (KV) tensors across different users when their requests share identical initial tokens. Because reusing cached tensors is significantly faster than recomputing them, a measurable difference in Time-To-First-Token (TTFT) exists between cache hits and misses. An attacker can exploit this shared cache by sending…
PrefixWall: Mitigating Prefix Caching Side Channels in Shared LLM Systems
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…
Clone What You Can't Steal: Black-Box LLM Replication via Logit Leakage and Distillation
Multi-tenant Large Language Model (LLM) inference systems utilizing global Key-Value (KV) cache sharing are vulnerable to a timing side-channel attack. By measuring the Time-To-First-Token (TTFT) latency of crafted API requests, an unprivileged remote attacker can determine if specific token sequences have been previously processed and cached by the system for other users. This observable timing difference between cache hits (low TTFT) and cache misses (high TTFT) allows for the token-by-token…
Selective KV-Cache Sharing to Mitigate Timing Side-Channels in LLM Inference