Prompt layer Vulnerabilities

A contextual integrity vulnerability exists in the memory mechanisms of multi-turn Text-to-Image (T2I) generation systems (e.g., those integrating Large Language Models with diffusion models). The vulnerability, dubbed "Inception," arises because safety filters typically operate on a per-turn basis, inspecting only the current input prompt, while the image generation model operates on an aggregated context (memory) of the conversation history. An attacker can exploit this discrepancy by…

A vulnerability exists in multiple LLMs allowing attackers to elicit harmful responses by strategically distributing malicious intent across multiple turns in a conversation. The vulnerability is not detected by single-turn safety measures, as the harmful intent is only revealed through a sequence of seemingly benign prompts. The vulnerability is exacerbated by the use of techniques such as prompt optimization that dynamically adjust prompts based on model responses, maximizing the likelihood…

A vulnerability in multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems allows for a permutation-invariant adversarial prompt attack. By strategically partitioning adversarial prompts and routing them through a network topology, an attacker can bypass distributed safety mechanisms, even those with token bandwidth limitations and asynchronous message delivery. The attack optimizes prompt propagation as a maximum-flow minimum-cost problem, maximizing success while minimizing detection.

Large Language Models (LLMs) with user-controlled response prefilling features are vulnerable to a novel jailbreak attack. By manipulating the prefilled text, attackers can influence the model's subsequent token generation, bypassing safety mechanisms and eliciting harmful or unintended outputs. Two attack vectors are demonstrated: Static Prefilling (SP), using a fixed prefill string, and Optimized Prefilling (OP), iteratively optimizing the prefill string for maximum impact. The vulnerability…

Multi-agent systems (MAS) utilizing Large Language Model (LLM) orchestration are vulnerable to control-flow hijacking via indirect prompt injection, leading to Remote Code Execution (RCE). This vulnerability arises when a sub-agent (e.g., a file surfer or web surfer) processes untrusted input containing adversarial metadata, such as simulated error messages or administrative instructions. The sub-agent faithfully reproduces this adversarial content in its report to the orchestrator agent. The…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to multi-turn adversarial attacks that exploit incremental policy erosion. The attacker uses a breadth-first search strategy to generate multiple prompts at each turn, leveraging partial compliance from previous responses to gradually escalate the conversation towards eliciting disallowed outputs. Minor concessions accumulate, ultimately leading to complete circumvention of safety measures.

Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed using "Batch Prompting" strategies—where multiple distinct user queries are concatenated and processed in a single inference pass to reduce computational costs—are vulnerable to Cross-Query Prompt Injection. When a batch contains a mixture of benign queries and a single malicious query, the instructions within the malicious query (e.g., "apply this rule to every answer") bleed over the context window. This causes the model to apply the adversary's…

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are vulnerable to a cross-modal toxic continuation attack facilitated by reinforcement learning-tuned diffusion models. This vulnerability allows an attacker to bypass safety alignment and external guardrails (such as NSFW image filters) by pairing a specific text prefix with a "semantically adversarial" image. Unlike traditional gradient-based adversarial examples that rely on pixel noise, these images are semantically coherent but optimized via Denoising…

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on the CyberLLMInstruct dataset results in a critical degradation of safety alignment and refusal mechanisms. While the dataset comprises "pseudo-malicious" content (educational descriptions of malware, phishing, and exploits without executable payloads), the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) process on this corpus causes the models to generalize this instruction-following behavior to actual malicious requests. This effectively bypasses safety guardrails…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to Dialogue Injection Attacks (DIA), where malicious actors manipulate the chat history to bypass safety mechanisms and elicit harmful or unethical responses. DIA exploits the LLM's chat template structure to inject crafted dialogue into the input, even in black-box scenarios where the model's internals are unknown. Two attack methods are presented: one adapts gray-box prefilling attacks, the other leverages deferred responses to increase the…