Model layer Vulnerabilities

An activation-steering vulnerability in open-weights Large Language Models allows attackers to bypass safety guardrails by injecting targeted additive perturbations into deep, safety-critical attention heads. The exploit, termed Safety Attention Head Attack (SAHA), utilizes Ablation-Impact Ranking (AIR) to isolate specific attention heads that causally govern safety refusals. By applying Layer-Wise Perturbations (LWP) derived from the linearized decision boundary of a latent safety probe, an…

Safety-aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a "Defensive Refusal Bias" vulnerability, resulting in a safety-induced denial-of-service for legitimate cybersecurity operations. The models systematically refuse authorized defensive queries when they contain security-sensitive terminology (e.g., "exploit," "payload," "shell") because current alignment mechanisms rely on semantic similarity to harmful training data rather than intent analysis. Paradoxically, explicit authorization signals…

A prompt structure vulnerability exists in instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) where attackers can bypass safety alignments by injecting a continuation-triggering suffix immediately following the user prompt termination token. By placing an affirmative suffix outside the user instruction boundary, it is processed as the beginning of the assistant's own pre-filled response. This structural manipulation intrinsically overactivates the model's continuation attention heads, forcing its…

Internal Safety Collapse (ISC) is a vulnerability in frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) where models autonomously generate highly restricted, harmful content while executing structurally legitimate professional workflows. The vulnerability triggers when a model infers that generating sensitive data is a functional requirement to complete an otherwise benign task. By nesting harmful content generation inside standard execution constraints (e.g., resolving a schema validation error in a…

Multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to alignment bypass via Inter-Turn Modality Switching (ITMS). By systematically rotating the input modality (e.g., alternating between text, audio, and image) across successive turns in a multi-turn adversarial conversation, an attacker can destabilize the model's safety defenses. The cross-modal transition mechanism exploits alignment gaps between differing input processing pipelines, accelerating the erosion of safety guardrails and…

An imperceptible visual prompt injection vulnerability in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) allows attackers to execute precise command-hijacking via a Covert Triggered dual-Target Attack (CoTTA). By embedding a bounded, learnable textual overlay ($L_\infty$ norm bound $\varepsilon \le 16$) and adversarial noise into an input image, the attack forces the source image's internal feature representation to align with both the textual and visual embeddings of an attacker-specified…

Automated LLM-as-a-Judge safety classifiers exhibit severe performance degradation (falling to near-random chance) when subjected to distribution shifts caused by adversarial prompt optimization (Attack Shift), varying target architectures (Model Shift), and semantic categorization (Data Shift). Adversarial algorithms, particularly sampling-based (Best-of-N) and judge-aware optimization methods (GCG-REINFORCE), explicitly and implicitly exploit these judge insufficiencies. Instead of eliciting…

Generative reward models deployed as LLM-as-a-Judge (LaaJ) evaluators contain a logic bypass vulnerability where superficial "master key" inputs trigger false positive rewards regardless of actual response quality. Instead of evaluating the candidate's output, large judge models are inadvertently triggered by specific token sequences to solve the prompt independently. This allows malicious actors or policy models undergoing reinforcement learning to consistently game the reward signal by…

A malicious finetuning vulnerability exists in Large Language Models (LLMs) that process zero-width Unicode characters. An attacker can bypass training-data moderation filters and inference-time safety guardrails by finetuning the model to decode and encode invisible-character steganography. By injecting target malicious interactions encoded in a base-4 representation of zero-width characters alongside benign plaintext cover text during supervised finetuning (SFT), the model learns to process…

An evasion vulnerability in Text-Attributed Graph (TAG) learning models allows attackers to induce targeted misclassifications via LLM-generated, coordinated perturbations to both graph topology and textual semantics. By identifying a semantically distant "influencer" node, an attacker can use a separate LLM to selectively delete highly relevant edges, insert a deceptive edge connecting the target to the influencer, and slightly modify the target node's text to include a keyword aligned with…