Safety Vulnerabilities

A vulnerability exists in the tool selection mechanisms of Large Language Model (LLM) agents, identified as the "Attractive Metadata Attack" (AMA). This flaw allows an adversary to manipulate the metadata (names, descriptions, and parameter schemas) of malicious external tools to statistically maximize the likelihood of their selection by the agent, without requiring prompt injection or access to model internals. The vulnerability exploits the agent’s semantic scoring function used to map user…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to automated adversarial attacks that systematically combine multiple jailbreaking "primitives" into complex prompt chains. A dynamic optimization engine can generate and test billions of unique combinations of techniques (e.g., low-resource language translation, payload splitting, role-playing) to bypass safety guardrails. This combinatorial approach differs from manual red-teaming by systematically exploring the attack surface, achieving…

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) can be instructed via a single system prompt to act as autonomous adversarial agents. These agents engage in multi-turn persuasive dialogues to systematically bypass the safety mechanisms of target language models. The LRM autonomously plans and executes the attack by initiating a benign conversation and gradually escalating the harmfulness of its requests, thereby circumventing defenses that are not robust to sustained, context-aware persuasive attacks. This…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to a jailbreak attack strategy known as Balanced Structural Decomposition (BSD). This vulnerability exploits a structural trade-off in safety alignment where models fail to detect malicious intent when the input balances semantic relevance ("On-Topicness") with distributional novelty ("OOD-Intensity"). The attack functions by recursively decomposing a harmful text objective into a tree of sub-tasks using an "Explore" (diversity) and…

Audio-Language Models (ALMs) including Qwen2.5-Omni (3B and 7B) and Phi-4-Multimodal are vulnerable to "WhisperInject," a two-stage adversarial audio attack that bypasses safety guardrails. The vulnerability allows an attacker to inject imperceptible perturbations into benign audio inputs (e.g., a query about the weather) that force the model to generate specific harmful content. The attack utilizes a novel optimization method, Reinforcement Learning with Projected Gradient Descent (RL-PGD)…

A Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) vulnerability exists in LLM-enabled agentic systems that execute multi-step plans involving sequential tool calls. The vulnerability arises because plans are not executed atomically. An agent may perform a "check" operation (e.g., reading a file, checking a permission) in one tool call, and a subsequent "use" operation (e.g., writing to the file, performing a privileged action) in another tool call. A temporal gap between these calls, often used for LLM…

A vulnerability, known as Latent Fusion Jailbreak (LFJ), exists in certain Large Language Models that allows an attacker with white-box access to bypass safety alignments. The attack interpolates the internal hidden state representations of a harmful query and a thematically similar benign query. By using gradient-guided optimization to identify and modify influential layers and tokens, a fused hidden state is created that causes the model to generate prohibited content in response to the…

Large language models that support a developer role in their API are vulnerable to a jailbreaking attack that leverages malicious developer messages. An attacker can craft a developer message that overrides the model's safety alignment by setting a permissive persona, providing explicit instructions to bypass refusals, and using few-shot examples of harmful query-response pairs. This technique, named D-Attack, is effective on its own. A more advanced variant, DH-CoT, enhances the attack by…

The Magic-Token-Guided Co-Training (MTC) framework for Large Language Models (LLMs) introduces a mechanism where distinct behavioral modes are activated via hardcoded system-level strings known as "magic tokens." A specific vulnerability exists in the implementation of the "negative" (neg) behavior mode, which is explicitly trained to generate unfiltered, risk-prone, and harmful content for internal red-teaming. The framework relies on the secrecy of the magic token (e.g., a random string like…

IntentionReasoner, specifically the 1.5B and 3B parameter versions optimized via Reinforcement Learning (RL), contains a safety regression vulnerability where the RL alignment process degrades the model's resistance to jailbreak attacks compared to the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) baseline. While RL improves general utility and rewriting quality, it inadvertently increases the Attack Success Rate (ASR) for adversarial inputs in smaller architectures. This allows sophisticated jailbreak prompts…