Model layer Vulnerabilities

A targeted fault-injection vulnerability exists in Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed on hardware susceptible to Rowhammer memory attacks. An attacker with white-box access or co-located memory access can use the TFL (Targeted bit-Flip attack on LLM) framework to induce precise bit-flips (fewer than 50 bits) in the model's weights stored in DRAM. By utilizing a gradient-based search with a keyword-focused attack loss and an auxiliary utility score, the attacker can manipulate the model to…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit the positional sensitivity of adversarial tokens. Existing gradient-based attacks, such as the Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG), conventionally append adversarial tokens as a suffix to the user prompt. This vulnerability allows attackers to bypass safety alignment mechanisms with significantly higher success rates by optimizing adversarial tokens as a prefix (GCG-Prefix) or relocating existing adversarial suffixes to…

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are vulnerable to a universal and transferable adversarial attack dubbed "UltraBreak." This vulnerability allows remote attackers to bypass safety alignment filters and elicit harmful responses (e.g., hate speech, dangerous instructions) by supplying a single, specifically crafted adversarial image alongside a text query. Unlike traditional gradient-based attacks that optimize for specific token sequences (cross-entropy loss) and result in brittle…

Text scoring models, including dense retrievers, rerankers, and reward models, are vulnerable to score manipulation attacks via search-based discrete perturbations and content injection. An attacker can systematically modify candidate texts using rudimentary string manipulations, gradient-guided token swaps (e.g., HotFlip), masked language modeling (MLM) swaps, or query/sentence injections to spuriously increase model scores. This structural failure condition allows an irrelevant passage or a…

Vision Language Models (VLMs) utilizing independent vision encoders (e.g., ViT) and Large Language Model (LLM) decoders are vulnerable to Split-Image Visual Jailbreak Attacks (SIVA). The vulnerability arises from an architectural and alignment discrepancy: while the vision encoder processes image fragments (splits) in isolation via constrained attention or block-diagonal masks, the LLM decoder aggregates these features via cross-attention to reconstruct the semantic content. Current safety…

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are vulnerable to Visual Memory Injection (VMI), a stealthy targeted attack targeting multi-turn conversations. An attacker can embed an imperceptible adversarial perturbation ($L_\infty \le 8/255$) into a seemingly benign image. Because the visual input persists in the model's context throughout a multi-turn dialogue, the injected payload remains dormant. By utilizing "benign anchoring" and "context-cycling" during optimization, the attacker ensures the…

Audio Large Language Models (ALLMs) integrated into voice agent systems for high-stakes domains (banking, IT support, logistics) are vulnerable to multimodal adversarial attacks via spoken interaction. Adversaries can exploit the model's inherent compliance and contextual awareness through multi-turn dialogue to bypass authentication safeguards, escalate privileges (e.g., unauthorized credit limit increases), exfiltrate sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and poison…

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…

The paper reports a black-box jailbreak evaluation in which a ReAct-style loop adaptively rewrites unsafe text prompts and selectively applies blur, DCT filtering, or recoloring to image regions identified as safety-sensitive. The combined cross-modal strategy is intended to make harmful image-text requests appear less objectionable to a vision-language model while preserving enough semantics to elicit an answer. This is a specific, security-relevant evaluation, although the reported results…

The paper describes a specific black-box jailbreak evaluation, BVS, in which fragmented visual content is mixed with neutral imagery and paired with reconstruction-oriented text so harmful intent is only recomposed during multimodal reasoning. The authors report that this can bypass input and output safety assumptions in image-generating MLLMs. A safe defensive reproduction should use synthetic, non-harmful stand-ins for prohibited concepts, test whether fragmented cross-modal inputs are…