Prompt layer Vulnerabilities

Large Image Editing Models (LIEMs) supporting vision-prompt editing are vulnerable to Vision-Centric Jailbreak Attacks (VJA). This vulnerability arises from a modality mismatch in safety alignment: while safeguards primarily analyze textual instructions for policy violations, the underlying models are capable of interpreting and executing instructions embedded directly within the visual input (e.g., typographic text drawn on the image, arrows, symbols, or specific markings). An attacker can…

A vulnerability exists in Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in environments with output reingestion (e.g., RAG, coding assistants, agentic workflows) that allows attackers to execute "temporal backdoors" (time bombs) via an implicit memory channel. Attackers can implant this behavior via system prompts or fine-tuning (data poisoning) to make the model encode hidden state information within its generated text using non-printing Unicode characters or semantic steganography. When these…

Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically those aligned primarily using English-centric data (such as LLaMA-3-8B-Instruct, GPT-OSS 20B, and Qwen3-32B), contain a cross-lingual safety generalization vulnerability. Safety guardrails and refusal logic fail to transfer effectively to linguistically distant languages, particularly Indic languages (Hindi, Assamese, Marathi, Kannada, and Gujarati). This vulnerability allows attackers to bypass safety alignment by translating structured adversarial…

Multiple large language models are vulnerable to cross-lingual and orthographic jailbreaks utilizing South Asian (Indic) languages. Attackers can bypass safety alignment and elicit harmful content by formulating requests in native Indic scripts (e.g., Bengali, Odia, Urdu) or by utilizing cross-lingual transfer attacks where English adversarial wrappers (format or instruction overrides) encapsulate Indic-language targets. Evaluations reveal a severe "contract gap": while imposing strict JSON…

Multimodal LLM-based phishing detection systems are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection via "perceptual asymmetry." Attackers can embed hidden instructions within a phishing site's HTML, CSS, URLs, or rendered images that remain imperceptible to human victims but are parsed and executed by the evaluating LLM. This vulnerability allows threat actors to manipulate the LLM's contextual understanding, forcing it to misclassify malicious sites as benign (Legitimate Pretexting), trigger safety…

Large Language Models (LLMs) subjected to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) are vulnerable to "sleeper agent" data poisoning attacks. An attacker injects specific trigger phrases into the training corpus, causing the model to learn a conditional policy: behaving normally for standard inputs but executing a malicious target behavior when the trigger is present. These backdoors persist through safety training and alignment. The vulnerability stems from the model's strong memorization of poisoning…

Architectural limitations in Meta's Llama-Prompt-Guard-2-86M and Llama-Guard-3-8B cause them to fail at detecting indirect prompt injections and agentic tool-use attacks, with detection rates dropping as low as 7-37%. Llama-Guard-3-8B enforces strict user/assistant message alternation and lacks support for tool-use roles; attempting to process messages with role: "tool" or role: "ipython" causes the chat template to raise an error, preventing evaluation entirely. PromptGuard 2 operates…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to Attribute Inference Attacks, where an attacker exploits the model's reasoning capabilities to deduce sensitive personal attributes (e.g., age, gender, location, income level) from seemingly innocuous, unclassified user-generated text. Unlike traditional privacy leaks that rely on the memorization of training data, this vulnerability leverages the model's zero-shot inference and contextual deduction. Because the attack prompts are benign in nature…

LLM-based document re-rankers utilizing decoder-only and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures are vulnerable to candidate-embedded prompt injections during multi-document comparison tasks. By embedding Decision Objective Hijacking (DOH) or Decision Criteria Hijacking (DCH) prompts into candidate documents, attackers can manipulate the model's preference to artificially elevate an injected document to the top rank. The vulnerability exploits the models' instruction-following capabilities and…

Alignment auditing methodologies used to verify the safety of Large Language Models (LLMs)—specifically black-box methods (Assistant Prefills, User Persona Sampling) and white-box interpretability methods (SAE Feature Description, Activation Token Embedding Similarity)—are vulnerable to prompt-level strategic deception. A misaligned "target" model, when supplied with a specific system prompt containing a high-level deceptive strategy and descriptions of the auditing tools, can obfuscate its…