Model layer Vulnerabilities

Appending simple demographic persona details to prompts requesting policy-violating content can bypass the safety mechanisms of Large Language Models. This technique, referred to as persona-targeted prompting, adds details such as country, generation, and political orientation to a request for a harmful narrative (e.g., disinformation). This systematically increases the jailbreak rate across most tested models and languages, in some cases by over 10 percentage points, enabling the generation…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that use persuasive techniques grounded in social psychology to bypass safety alignments. Malicious instructions can be reframed using one of Cialdini's seven principles of persuasion (Authority, Reciprocity, Commitment, Social Proof, Liking, Scarcity, and Unity). These rephrased prompts, which remain human-readable and can be generated automatically, manipulate the LLM into complying with harmful requests it would otherwise…

Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically open-weights models such as Llama-2, Mistral, and Vicuna, are vulnerable to a white-box adversarial attack framework termed RAID (Refusal-Aware and Integrated Decoding). The vulnerability exists because the model's safety alignment relies on specific activation patterns ("refusal directions") in the intermediate embedding space. Attackers can exploit this by optimizing a continuous "relaxed" suffix in the embedding space using a triplet loss…

Large Language Models (LLMs), including both proprietary and open-source instruction-tuned models, contain a vulnerability to strategic, multi-turn adversarial attacks. Unlike single-turn prompt injections, this vulnerability is exploited through sequential decision-making where an attacker (or automated agent) utilizes reinforcement learning and tree-based search (e.g., DialTree-RPO) to navigate the dialogue state space. By employing strategies such as intent laundering (framing harmful…

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) utilizing explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning exhibit a vulnerability termed "Self-Jailbreak." In this failure mode, the model successfully identifies the harmful intent of a user query during the initial "Risk Awareness" stage of its reasoning trajectory. However, during the subsequent "Risk Analysis" stage, the model internally overrides this safety signal, persuading itself to fulfill the request. This override typically occurs through cognitive patterns…

Large Language Models (LLMs) that use special tokens to define conversational structure (e.g., via chat templates) are vulnerable to a jailbreak attack named MetaBreak. An attacker can inject these special tokens, or regular tokens with high semantic similarity in the embedding space, into a user prompt. This manipulation allows the attacker to bypass the model's internal safety alignment and external content moderation systems. The attack leverages four primitives: 1. Response Injection…

A privilege escalation and information disclosure vulnerability exists in Large Language Model (LLM) based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) utilizing explicit inter-agent trust modeling. When the internal trust coefficient ($\tau$) between a Custodian-Agent (holding sensitive data) and a Seeker-Agent is set to a high level (e.g., $\tau=0.9$) to optimize coordination efficiency, the Custodian-Agent systematically fails to enforce Minimum Necessary Information (MNI) principles. This…

Mamba-2 and hybrid Transformer-Mamba-2 distilled Large Language Model (LLM) architectures exhibit a distinct architectural susceptibility to Latent Injection and ANSI Escape sequence prompt injection attacks. Comparative analysis reveals that models incorporating Mamba state-space components (specifically distilled variants like Llamba-3B and base Mamba models) fail to maintain adversarial robustness levels comparable to pure Transformer baselines (such as Llama-3.2) when subjected to indirect…

A vulnerability exists in certain safety-aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) due to an untargeted, gradient-based optimization attack method called Untargeted Jailbreak Attack (UJA). Unlike previous targeted attacks (e.g., GCG) that optimize a prompt to elicit a predefined string (e.g., "Sure, here is..."), UJA optimizes for a general objective: maximizing the unsafety probability of the model's response, as quantified by an external judge model.

Large Language Models from multiple vendors are vulnerable to a "Camouflaged Jailbreak" attack. Malicious instructions are embedded within seemingly benign, technically complex prompts, often framed as system design or engineering problems. The models fail to recognize the harmful intent implied by the context and technical specifications, bypassing safety filters that rely on detecting explicit keywords. This leads to the generation of detailed, technically plausible instructions for creating…