Model layer Vulnerabilities

A vulnerability exists in Reasoning Language Models (RLMs), specifically those fine-tuned on benign reasoning tasks (e.g., mathematics, coding) such as DeepSeek-R1-distilled, s1.1, and Phi-4-mini-reasoning. The vulnerability, termed "Self-Jailbreaking," allows the model to circumvent its own safety guardrails during the internal Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generation process. Despite initially recognizing a user query as harmful, the model utilizes multi-step reasoning to spontaneously fabricate…

A vulnerability exists in the self-reflection and introspection capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-LLMs that allows attackers to perform black-box adversarial optimization using only textual model responses. This technique, termed "Asking for Directions" (AfD), bypasses the need for access to gradients, logits, or continuous confidence scores. The attacker employs a hill-climbing optimization strategy where they present the target model with two candidate inputs (an…

Large Language Model (LLM) fine-tuning interfaces are vulnerable to a semantic obfuscation attack that bypasses multi-stage safety defenses, including pre-upload data filtering, defensive fine-tuning algorithms, and post-training safety audits. The vulnerability exploits a "self-auditing" flaw where the provider uses the target model (or a similar variant) to screen training data. Attackers can submit a small dataset (approx. 500 samples) where harmful answers are obfuscated using a…

A jailbreak vulnerability, known as Task Concurrency, exists in multiple Large Language Models (LLMs). The vulnerability arises when two distinct tasks, one harmful and one benign, are interleaved at the word level within a single prompt. The structure of the malicious prompt alternates words from each task, often using separators like {} to encapsulate words from the second task. This "concurrent" instruction format obfuscates the harmful intent from the model's safety guardrails, causing the…

Graph-LLMs (Graph Neural Networks integrated with Large Language Models) utilized for representation learning on Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) are vulnerable to the Interpretable Multi-Dimensional Graph Attack (IMDGA). This vulnerability exists due to the non-decoupled nature of text encoding and graph message passing mechanisms. A black-box attacker can manipulate node classification predictions by executing a three-stage attack: (1) utilizing a word-level Topological SHAP module to identify…

A "Priming Vulnerability" exists in Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) due to their iterative, parallel denoising inference mechanism. Unlike autoregressive models that generate tokens sequentially, MDLMs refine a sequence from a fully masked state through multiple denoising steps. The vulnerability arises because standard safety alignment (e.g., SFT, DPO, MOSA) typically optimizes the model to generate safe responses only when initialized from a fully masked sequence. If an affirmative…

A security vulnerability exists in the safety alignment mechanisms of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically susceptible to the "Dynamic Target Attack" (DTA). Unlike traditional gradient-based jailbreaks (e.g., GCG) that optimize adversarial suffixes toward a fixed, low-probability static target (e.g., "Sure, here is..."), DTA exploits the model's own output distribution. The attack iteratively samples candidate responses from the target model using relaxed decoding parameters (high…

Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically variants of GPT-4o, DeepSeek-R1, OLMo-2, and Llama-4, are vulnerable to accelerated adaptive adversarial attacks due to excessive information leakage in observable output signals. When these models expose "thinking processes" (Chain-of-Thought traces) or token-level log-probabilities (logits) to the end user, they leak significant mutual information $I(Z;T)$ regarding the model's safety state or hidden instructions. This leakage allows adaptive attack…

A vulnerability exists in Large Language Models (LLMs) that support fine-tuning, allowing an attacker to bypass safety alignments using a small, benign dataset. The attack, "Attack via Overfitting," is a two-stage process. In Stage 1, the model is fine-tuned on a small set of benign questions (e.g., 10) paired with identical, repetitive refusal answers. This induces an overfitted state where the model learns to refuse all prompts, creating a sharp minimum in the loss landscape and making it…

Pattern Enhanced Chain of Attack (PE-CoA) shows that safety controls can be bypassed gradually across a conversation. The paper evaluates five recurring conversational patterns and finds that resistance to one pattern does not reliably generalize to others, creating a black-box, multi-turn jailbreak risk even when individual turns appear benign.