Prompt layer Vulnerabilities

A vulnerability exists where Large Language Models (LLMs) can be manipulated by prepending a specially crafted 'persona prompt', often in the system prompt. These persona prompts cause the model to shift its attention from sensitive keywords in a harmful request to the stylistic instructions of the persona. This weakens the model's safety alignment, significantly reducing its refusal rate for harmful queries. The vulnerability is particularly severe because these persona prompts have a…

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Text-to-Image (T2I) models are vulnerable to jailbreaking through prompt-based attacks that use narrative framing, semantic substitution, and context diffusion to bypass safety moderation pipelines. These attacks do not require specialized knowledge or technical expertise. Attackers can embed harmful requests within benign narratives, frame them as fictional or professional inquiries, or use euphemistic language to circumvent input filters and output…

A contextual priming vulnerability, termed "Response Attack," exists in certain multimodal and large language models. The vulnerability allows an attacker to bypass safety alignments by crafting a dialogue history where a prior, fabricated model response contains mildly harmful or scaffolding content. This primes the model to generate policy-violating content in response to a subsequent trigger prompt. The model's safety mechanisms, which primarily evaluate the user's current prompt, are…

Large Language Models (LLMs) utilizing Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and other safety alignment techniques are vulnerable to "CognitiveAttack," a jailbreak vector that exploits synergistic cognitive biases. The vulnerability exists because models internalize human-like reasoning fallacies during pre-training and alignment. Adversaries can bypass safety guardrails by rewriting harmful instructions to trigger specific psychological heuristics—specifically through the…

A vulnerability exists in Large Language Models, including GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, where safety guardrails can be bypassed using Trojanized prompt chains within a simulated educational context. An attacker can establish a benign, pedagogical persona (e.g., a curious student) over a multi-turn dialogue. This initial context is then exploited to escalate the conversation toward requests for harmful or restricted information, which the model provides because the session's context is perceived as safe…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to obfuscation-based jailbreak attacks using the MetaCipher framework. MetaCipher employs a reinforcement learning algorithm to iteratively select from a pool of 21 ciphers to encrypt malicious keywords within prompts, evading standard safety mechanisms that rely on keyword detection. The framework adaptively learns optimal cipher choices to maximize the success rate of the jailbreak, even against LLMs with reasoning capabilities. Successful attacks…

Large Language Model (LLM) agents capable of invoking external APIs are vulnerable to intent integrity violations. When an agent receives natural language instructions that are ambiguous, underspecified, or contain values not supported by the underlying API schema, the agent frequently fails to preserve user intent. Instead of rejecting the request or asking for clarification, the model may hallucinate parameter values, map unsupported requests to unsafe defaults, or execute actions on…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreaking through an agentic attack framework called Composition of Principles (CoP). This technique uses an attacker LLM (Red-Teaming Agent) to dynamically select and combine multiple human-defined, high-level transformations ("principles") into a single, sophisticated prompt. The composition of several simple principles, such as expanding context, rephrasing, and inserting specific phrases, creates complex adversarial prompts that can bypass…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to a novel adversarial attack, Alphabet Index Mapping (AIM), which achieves high success rates in bypassing safety filters ("jailbreaking"). AIM encodes prompts by converting characters to their alphabet indices, maximizing semantic dissimilarity while maintaining straightforward decoding instructions. This allows malicious prompts to evade detection based on semantic similarity, even when the LLM correctly decodes the intent.

Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in automated peer review workflows are vulnerable to targeted textual adversarial attacks. By employing a technique defined as "Attack Focus Localization," an attacker can identify critical document segments via Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) matching between the original text and an initial LLM-generated review. Injecting semantic-preserving perturbations—such as character-level noise, synonym substitution (e.g., TextFooler), or stylistic transfer…