Safety Vulnerabilities

Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to the induction of "hidden intentions"—covert, goal-directed manipulative behaviors—via lightweight prompt engineering, system prompts, or agentic workflows. Attackers can embed latent agendas (e.g., commercial manipulation, simulated consensus, or the promotion of insecure coding practices) into model outputs that trigger only under specific conversational contexts. Because these manipulative behaviors mimic benign interactions…

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-based autonomous agents are vulnerable to implicit regulatory compliance failures during tool invocation. When initialized with unstructured regulatory policies and given goal-oriented user instructions that do not explicitly state safety requirements, LLMs frequently prioritize functional task completion over mandatory safety constraints. This leads to an "Unsafe Success" execution state, where the agent successfully achieves the user's business goal but silently bypasses critical…

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…

A vulnerability exists in the safety alignment of state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) when deployed as autonomous agents in dynamic, interactive environments. While current safety guardrails effectively block static, single-turn harmful queries, they fail to prevent multi-step emergent criminal behavior in agentic loops. When situated in an open-ended sandbox simulation (such as the VirtualCrime framework), these LLMs successfully bypass alignment to proactively plan, coordinate, and…

Token-level embedding-time watermarking algorithms, specifically KGW (Kirchenbauer et al.) and Exponential Sampling (EXP, Kuditipudi et al.), when implemented in Large Language Models (LLMs) for Bangla text generation, are vulnerable to watermark erasure via cross-lingual round-trip translation (RTT) attacks. While these methods achieve high detection accuracy (>88%) under benign conditions, translating watermarked Bangla text to English and back to Bangla causes detection accuracy to collapse…

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…