Safety Vulnerabilities

A vulnerability exists in multiple large language and multimodal models that allows for the bypass of safety filters through the use of code-mixed prompts with phonetic perturbations. An attacker can craft a prompt in a code-mixed language (e.g., Hinglish) and apply phonetic misspellings to sensitive keywords (e.g., spelling "hate" as "haet"). This technique causes the model's tokenizer to parse the sensitive word into benign sub-tokens, preventing safety mechanisms from flagging the harmful…

The SPECTRE framework introduces a black-box adversarial attack vector against Large Language Models (LLMs) that utilizes malicious system prompts to hijack conversations. Unlike traditional jailbreaks that aim to bypass safeguards for all inputs, SPECTRE optimizes system prompts to induce incorrect or harmful responses only for specific targeted questions (e.g., "Are COVID vaccines safe?", "Who should I vote for?"), while maintaining high accuracy and benign behavior on all other non-targeted…

DNA language models, such as the Evo series, are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that coerce the generation of DNA sequences with high homology to known human pathogens. The GeneBreaker framework demonstrates this by using a combination of carefully crafted prompts leveraging high-homology non-pathogenic sequences and a beam search guided by pathogenicity prediction models (e.g., PathoLM) and log-probability heuristics. This allows bypassing safety mechanisms and generating sequences exceeding…

A vulnerability exists in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) monitoring protocols where trusted monitor models can be deceived by deceptive reasoning traces generated by untrusted models. Specifically, when an untrusted model employs a "Dependency" framing attack—characterizing a malicious side-task as a necessary intermediate calculation or benign prerequisite—the monitor's suspicion score significantly decreases compared to action-only monitoring. This creates a paradox where providing the monitor with…

GhostPrompt demonstrates a vulnerability in multimodal safety filters used with text-to-image generative models. The vulnerability allows attackers to bypass these filters by using a dynamic prompt optimization framework that iteratively generates adversarial prompts designed to evade both text-based and image-based safety checks while preserving the original, harmful intent of the prompt. This bypass is achieved through a combination of semantically aligned prompt rewriting and the injection…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) used in Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) systems are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Adversarially crafted natural language instructions, even when disguised within seemingly benign prompts, can bypass safety mechanisms and cause the VLN agent to perform unintended or harmful actions in both simulated and real-world environments. The attacks exploit the MLLM's ability to follow instructions without sufficient consideration of the consequences of…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit the model's inherent persuasive nature. A novel attack framework, CL-GSO, decomposes jailbreak strategies into four components (Role, Content Support, Context, Communication Skills), creating a significantly expanded strategy space compared to prior methods. This expanded space allows for the generation of prompts that bypass safety protocols with a success rate exceeding 90% on models previously considered…

A vulnerability in several open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) allows attackers using exponentiated gradient descent to craft adversarial prompts that cause the models to generate harmful or unintended outputs, effectively "jailbreaking" the safety alignment mechanisms. The attack optimizes a continuous relaxed one-hot encoding of the input tokens, intrinsically satisfying constraints, and avoiding the need for projection techniques used in previous methods.

Speech-LLMs Qwen2-Audio (7B-Instruct) and Granite-Speech (3.2-8b) are vulnerable to universal acoustic adversarial attacks. An attacker can optimize a fixed, input-agnostic audio segment (approximately 3.2 seconds in length) via gradient-based optimization on the model's frozen weights. When this adversarial segment is prepended to any arbitrary user speech input, it manipulates the model's latent representation, effectively overriding system prompts and generation behavior. This vulnerability…

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to implicit jailbreak attacks that leverage least significant bit (LSB) steganography to conceal malicious instructions within images. These instructions are coupled with seemingly benign image-related text prompts, causing the MLLM to execute the hidden malicious instructions. The attack bypasses existing safety mechanisms by exploiting cross-modal reasoning capabilities.