Audio Vulnerabilities

A vulnerability in SpeechGPT allows bypassing safety filters through adversarial audio prompts crafted by a white-box token-level attack. The attacker leverages knowledge of SpeechGPT's internal speech tokenization process to generate adversarial token sequences, which are then synthesized into audio. These audio prompts elicit restricted or harmful outputs the model would normally suppress. The attack's effectiveness relies on the model's discrete audio token representation and does not…

Speech-LLMs Qwen2-Audio (7B-Instruct) and Granite-Speech (3.2-8b) are vulnerable to universal acoustic adversarial attacks. An attacker can optimize a fixed, input-agnostic audio segment (approximately 3.2 seconds in length) via gradient-based optimization on the model's frozen weights. When this adversarial segment is prepended to any arbitrary user speech input, it manipulates the model's latent representation, effectively overriding system prompts and generation behavior. This vulnerability…

An adversarial audio perturbation vulnerability exists in open-source Speech Language Models (SLMs), specifically Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct and LLaMa-Omni. The vulnerability allows remote attackers to bypass safety alignment mechanisms and jailbreak the model by injecting imperceptible adversarial noise into audio prompts. By utilizing white-box access and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) optimization, an attacker can manipulate the continuous speech signal to trigger harmful responses (e.g…

Large Audio-Language Models (LAMs) are vulnerable to adversarial signal-level perturbations that allow for the bypass of safety guardrails (jailbreaking). While these models may possess robust text-based safety alignment, they fail to generalize this robustness to the audio modality. Attackers can utilize the Audio Perturbation Toolkit (APT) to apply transformations in the time domain (Energy Distribution Perturbation, Trimming, Fade In/Out), frequency domain (Pitch Shifting, Temporal…

Multilingual and multi-accent audio inputs, combined with acoustic adversarial perturbations (reverberation, echo, whisper effects), can bypass safety mechanisms in Large Audio Language Models (LALMs), causing them to generate unsafe or harmful outputs. The vulnerability is amplified by the interaction between acoustic and linguistic variations, particularly in languages with less training data.

End-to-end Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) contain an audio-based jailbreak vulnerability allowing attackers to bypass safety alignment guardrails by manipulating audio-specific "hidden semantics." Unlike text-based attacks, this exploitation involves encoding harmful queries into audio and applying signal processing modifications—specifically changes to emphasis, speech speed, intonation, tone, background noise, celebrity accents, or emotional overlays (e.g., laughter, screaming). These…

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) are vulnerable to a stealthy adversarial jailbreak attack, AdvWave, which leverages a dual-phase optimization to overcome gradient shattering caused by audio discretization. The attack crafts adversarial audio by adding perceptually realistic environmental noise, making it difficult to detect. The attack also dynamically adapts the adversarial target based on the LALM's response patterns.

Multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) processing speech input are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Imperceptible perturbations added to audio input can cause the model to generate unsafe or harmful text responses, overriding built-in safety mechanisms. The attacks are effective even with limited knowledge of the model's internal workings, demonstrating transferability across different models.

A vulnerability in the voice mode of GPT-4o allows bypassing safety restrictions through a novel "Voice Jailbreak" attack. This attack leverages principles of fictional storytelling (setting, character, plot) to craft audio prompts that persuade the LLM to generate responses violating OpenAI's usage policies, including generating content related to illegal activities, hate speech, physical harm, fraud, pornography, and privacy violations. The attack's success rate is significantly higher than…