Prompt layer Vulnerabilities

Large Language Models (LLMs) employed as automated code evaluators ("Universal Graders") are vulnerable to Semantic-Instruction Decoupling, a form of adversarial prompt injection that exploits the "Syntax-Semantics Gap." Attackers can embed adversarial directives into syntactically inert regions of the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)—specifically comments, docstrings, variable names, and whitespace. While these regions are discarded by compilers (trivia nodes) or treated as arbitrary symbols…

Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Ministral-8B-Instruct-2410, Gemma-2-9B-It, and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, contain a safety guardrail bypass vulnerability when subjected to optimized adversarial prompts. The vulnerability is exposed via the RainbowPlus quality-diversity search method utilized within the RedBench evaluation framework. These models exhibit high Attack Success Rates (ASR)—up to 97.81% for Ministral and 96.25% for Llama-3.1—failing to refuse prompts in…

LLM-based evaluation systems ("LLM-as-a-Judge") exhibit a structural vulnerability termed "Framing Bias," wherein the model produces logically contradictory judgments depending on the syntactic framing of the evaluation prompt. Specifically, when assessing the same content using predicate-positive (P) framing (e.g., "Is this toxic?") versus predicate-negative (¬P) framing (e.g., "Is this non-toxic?"), models frequently fail to invert their binary decisions, leading to inconsistency rates…

LLM-as-a-Reviewer systems, which utilize large language models to automate the peer review process, are vulnerable to the Paraphrasing Adversarial Attack (PAA). PAA is a black-box optimization technique that exploits the model's sensitivity to specific input sequences and self-preference bias. By iteratively paraphrasing specific manuscript sections (such as the abstract) using in-context learning (ICL) guided by previous review scores, an attacker can generate adversarial sequences that…

LLM routing systems are vulnerable to adversarial rerouting attacks where malicious triggers prepended to user queries manipulate the router's model-selection mechanism. Because LLM routers function as classifiers evaluating query complexity to balance computational cost and response quality, an attacker can craft adversarial prefixes that distort the query's latent semantic representation. This exploits the router's decision boundaries, forcing the system to misclassify the input and redirect…

Large Language Models (LLMs) and dedicated content moderation systems (including safety guards and encoder-based classifiers) are vulnerable to "Soft Hate" evasion attacks. This vulnerability arises when hostile standpoints are encoded through defeasible reasoning structures—specifically formalized by the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT)—rather than explicit lexical toxicity. Attackers can bypass safety filters by framing discriminatory conclusions as logical inferences derived from widely…

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) specification v1.0 contains fundamental architectural vulnerabilities enabling server-side prompt injection and privilege escalation. The protocol relies on bidirectional sampling (sampling/createMessage) without cryptographic origin authentication or UI distinction, allowing connected servers to inject content that the LLM backend interprets as legitimate user input. Additionally, the protocol lacks isolation boundaries between concurrent server connections…

Code-generation Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to directed misuse for the generation of misleading data visualizations. This vulnerability, described as the "ChartAttack" framework, allows an attacker to prompt the model to manipulate chart annotation code (e.g., JSON specifications for Matplotlib or Vega-Lite) to apply specific "misleaders"—design choices that distort data interpretation without altering the underlying data values. By…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit a vulnerability to "Reasoning-based Multi-Image Attacks," where safety guardrails are bypassed by distributing harmful intent across multiple images (2–4 inputs). Unlike single-image jailbreaks that rely on visual obfuscation, this vulnerability exploits the model's reasoning capabilities. By presenting images that share a specific relationship (e.g., Temporal Jump, Spatial Juxtaposition, or Causality), an attacker can compel the model to infer…

Text-to-Image (T2I) models and their associated safety filters are vulnerable to MacPrompt, a black-box jailbreak technique that exploits cross-lingual embedding alignments. Attackers can bypass input text filters, latent representation filters, and model-level concept removal defenses by replacing sensitive keywords with "macaronic" substitutes. These substitutes are constructed by extracting and recombining character-level substrings from translations of the target word across multiple…