Black-box Vulnerabilities

A vulnerability exists in multiple state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs), including GPT-4o, Gemini-2.5, and LLaVA-OneVision, where persuasive textual misinformation successfully overrides visual evidence. When a model is presented with an image it can correctly interpret, an attacker can inject a contradictory text prompt employing specific rhetorical strategies (Logical, Credibility, Emotional, or Repetition) to force the model into generating a false response. This "obedience bias"…

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are vulnerable to Physical Prompt Injection Attacks (PPIA), a query-agnostic injection technique delivered via the visual modality. The vulnerability stems from the model's "Vision-Enabled Text Recognition" capabilities and "Identity Sensitivity," where the model interprets text embedded in the physical environment (e.g., printed on signs, posters, or objects) as high-priority instructions rather than passive visual data. An attacker can embed adversarial…

LLM-based code agents and vulnerability detectors employing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning are susceptible to automated adversarial code obfuscation. The vulnerability exists because CoT mechanisms expose the model's decision logic, allowing reinforcement learning frameworks (such as CoTDeceptor) to iteratively refine code transformations based on the detector's own reasoning traces. By optimizing for "reasoning instability" and "hallucination" rather than just syntactic evasion, attackers…

Large Language Model (LLM) agents operating in tool-augmented environments are susceptible to "Contextual Fragility" and multi-turn "long-chain" exploitation. Existing safety mechanisms predominantly function on a stateless, atomic paradigm, evaluating individual input-output pairs in isolation. This allows an adversary to orchestrate complex attack trajectories where malicious intent is distributed across multiple, individually benign steps (a "Domino Effect"). Consequently, an attacker can…

Commercial Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) integrated systems are vulnerable to a "Dual Steganography" jailbreak paradigm (referred to as Odysseus). The vulnerability arises from the reliance of safety filters on the assumption that malicious content must be explicitly visible in the input or output modalities (text or image). Attackers can bypass these filters by encoding malicious queries into binary matrices and embedding them into benign-looking images using steganographic encoders…

Frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a critical vulnerability to automated, adaptive multi-turn adversarial attacks, specifically those utilizing tree-based exploration algorithms (e.g., the TEMPEST framework). Unlike single-turn jailbreaks, this vulnerability exploits the model's inability to maintain safety alignment across extended conversation trajectories. An attacker using an automated agent can dynamically select from multiple adversarial strategies—such as academic framing…

A vulnerability exists in OpenAI's Custom GPTs platform where the lack of effective isolation between the system context ("Expert Prompt"), external knowledge retrieval, and user input allows for unauthorized information disclosure and tool misuse. By employing specific prompt injection techniques—including Hex injection, Many-shot prefix attacks, and Knowledge Poisoning (uploading malicious files)—an attacker can bypass safety guardrails. This results in the extraction of proprietary system…

A vulnerability exists in MetaGPT's DataInterpreter agent (and similar RAG-based agents utilizing persistent long-term memory) that allows for persistent memory poisoning via indirect injection. The vulnerability exploits the agent's "semantic imitation heuristic," where the agent blindly trusts and imitates retrieved past experiences. An attacker can supply a benign-looking artifact (e.g., a README file or documentation) containing executable code blocks or structured text that the agent…

A vulnerability exists in large language models where safety guardrails can be bypassed by decomposing a single harmful objective into a sequence of individually innocuous sub-queries. An attacker agent can use an adaptive tree search algorithm (Correlated Knowledge Attack Agent - CKA-Agent) to explore the target model's internal correlated knowledge. The agent issues benign queries, uses the model's responses to guide exploration along multiple reasoning paths, and aggregates the collected…

A Denial-of-Service (DoS) vulnerability exists in Large Language Model (LLM) inference services where specially crafted input prompts can trigger excessively long or infinite generation loops ("infinite thinking"). This vulnerability, identified as "ThinkTrap," utilizes derivative-free optimization (CMA-ES) within a continuous surrogate embedding space to circumvent the discrete nature of token inputs. By optimizing a low-dimensional latent vector and projecting it to token sequences, an…