Prompt layer Vulnerabilities

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to a novel jailbreak attack, "Speak Easy," which leverages common multi-step and multilingual interaction patterns to elicit harmful and actionable responses. The attack decomposes a malicious query into multiple seemingly innocuous sub-queries, translates them into various languages, and then selects the most actionable and informative responses from the LLM's output across languages. This bypasses existing safety mechanisms more effectively than…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to a universal adversarial attack where a single, optimized image can bypass safety alignment mechanisms across diverse textual queries. By employing gradient-based optimization on the input image pixels while propagating gradients through the vision encoder and language model, an attacker can craft a visual perturbation that coerces the model into a compliant state. When this adversarial image is present in the context, the model’s…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks leveraging mutation-based fuzzing techniques. The TurboFuzzLLM framework efficiently generates adversarial prompts, combining mutated templates with harmful questions to elicit unauthorized or malicious responses. This vulnerability allows bypassing built-in safeguards and obtaining harmful outputs through black-box API access. The effectiveness stems from advanced mutation strategies (including refusal suppression, prefix…

Post-hoc Large Language Model (LLM) unlearning and guardrailing mechanisms (specifically In-Context Unlearning [ICUL] and standard prompt-based Guardrailing) are vulnerable to information leakage attacks via "Target Masking" and indirect referencing. These systems rely on superficial semantic matching to suppress "forget sets" (specific entities or concepts). Attackers can bypass these restrictions by querying associated properties, relationships, or pseudonyms rather than the explicit target…

State-of-the-art machine unlearning and safety fine-tuning methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) fail to robustly remove hazardous capabilities or refusal mechanisms from model weights. While these methods suppress model outputs during standard input-output interactions, the underlying capabilities remain latent in the parameter space. An attacker with access to model weights (e.g., via open releases or leaked weights) can restore "unlearned" knowledge (such as dual-use biology hazards) or…

The SMAB (Sensitivity-based Multi-Armed Bandit) framework introduces a vulnerability in text classifiers and Large Language Models (LLMs) by enabling efficient, black-box adversarial text generation. The vulnerability exploits "word sensitivity"—the statistical probability that perturbing a specific word will flip a model's prediction—without requiring access to model weights or ground truth labels. By utilizing a Multi-Armed Bandit algorithm to explore and exploit word-level sensitivities…

The Emoti-Attack vulnerability constitutes a zero-word-perturbation adversarial attack against Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems and Large Language Models (LLMs). The vulnerability exploits the discrete embedding space of emojis and emoticons to manipulate model behavior without altering the semantic content or character integrity of the original text. By appending strategically optimized emoji sequences to the prefix and suffix of an input string (formalized as $s \oplus x \oplus…

A vulnerability exists in Large Language Model (LLM) routing systems (control planes) that allows for the manipulation of inference flow via adversarial input sequences. LLM routers, which dynamically direct user queries to either "weak" (cheaper) or "strong" (expensive) models based on predicted query complexity, can be bypassed by appending specific, pre-optimized token sequences known as "confounder gadgets." These gadgets artificially inflate the router's complexity score for an input…

A multi-step prompt injection vulnerability allows attackers to bypass Large Language Model (LLM) safety guardrails by combining prompt obfuscation with task decomposition. The attack methodology, identified as part of the CySecBench research, employs a "Word Reversal" technique where every fifth word in the malicious input is reversed to evade initial keyword detection. This obfuscated input is then embedded within a benign educational context, specifically instructing the model to act as a…

A vulnerability in several large language models (LLMs), including Qwen2.5-7BInstruct, Llama3.1-8B-Instruct, and GPT-4 variants, allows for black-box jailbreaking via prompt engineering techniques that exploit the proximity of benign and malicious prompt embeddings in the model's representation space. An attacker can craft prompts leveraging reinforcement learning to manipulate the embedding, causing the model to bypass its safety mechanisms and generate harmful or undesirable outputs while…