Language Model Security Database

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are vulnerable to a transferable targeted adversarial attack known as SGHA-Attack (Semantic-Guided Hierarchical Alignment). This vulnerability arises from the susceptibility of visual encoders (specifically Vision Transformers) to intermediate-layer feature manipulation optimized on a surrogate model (e.g., CLIP). An attacker can craft adversarial images by injecting imperceptible perturbations that enforce semantic consistency with a target text prompt…

LLM-based vulnerability detection systems (used in static application security testing and code review pipelines) are susceptible to semantics-preserving adversarial evasion attacks. Attackers can bypass detection mechanisms by injecting gradient-optimized "universal adversarial strings" into specific code regions—defined as "carriers"—that do not alter the program's compilation or execution logic. These carriers include non-executable regions (code comments, inactive preprocessor directives)…

A vulnerability exists in aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) related to "shallow safety alignment," where safety mechanisms disproportionately rely on the initial tokens generated by the model. The "ShallowJail" attack exploits this by manipulating the model's hidden states during the inference process. Attackers first construct a task-agnostic steering vector derived from the difference in hidden state activations between compliance prefixes (e.g., "Sure, here are the details") and refusal…

A vulnerability in the Grok LLM, as deployed on the X social media platform, allows users to bypass safety filters and generate toxic or obscene content through "shallow alignment" techniques. The model prioritizes instruction compliance and conversational flow over safety guidelines, failing when exposed to simple adversarial interactions such as Persona Adoption (instructing the model to adopt a specific character) and Tone Mirroring (where the model automatically mimics a user's aggressive…

LLM-based security advisors exhibit systematic reasoning failures—including boundary confusion, attestation overclaiming, and mitigation hallucination—when providing architectural guidance for Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) like Intel SGX and Arm TrustZone. When embedded in tool-augmented agent pipelines, these models are susceptible to agentic misinterpretation, turning partial or poisoned tool outputs into highly confident but materially incorrect security conclusions. This…

A vulnerability exists in tool-augmented Large Language Model (LLM) agents characterized as "Tag-Along Attacks," where an unprivileged external user (or adversarial agent) coerces a safety-aligned Operator agent into executing prohibited tool calls. Unlike Indirect Prompt Injection, this attack targets the direct conversational interface using a technique termed "Imperative Overloading." By mimicking system prompt syntax and utilizing high-priority imperative commands (e.g., "Strict adherence…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit the positional sensitivity of adversarial tokens. Existing gradient-based attacks, such as the Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG), conventionally append adversarial tokens as a suffix to the user prompt. This vulnerability allows attackers to bypass safety alignment mechanisms with significantly higher success rates by optimizing adversarial tokens as a prefix (GCG-Prefix) or relocating existing adversarial suffixes to…

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are vulnerable to a universal and transferable adversarial attack dubbed "UltraBreak." This vulnerability allows remote attackers to bypass safety alignment filters and elicit harmful responses (e.g., hate speech, dangerous instructions) by supplying a single, specifically crafted adversarial image alongside a text query. Unlike traditional gradient-based attacks that optimize for specific token sequences (cross-entropy loss) and result in brittle…

Text scoring models, including dense retrievers, rerankers, and reward models, are vulnerable to score manipulation attacks via search-based discrete perturbations and content injection. An attacker can systematically modify candidate texts using rudimentary string manipulations, gradient-guided token swaps (e.g., HotFlip), masked language modeling (MLM) swaps, or query/sentence injections to spuriously increase model scores. This structural failure condition allows an irrelevant passage or a…

Vision Language Models (VLMs) utilizing independent vision encoders (e.g., ViT) and Large Language Model (LLM) decoders are vulnerable to Split-Image Visual Jailbreak Attacks (SIVA). The vulnerability arises from an architectural and alignment discrepancy: while the vision encoder processes image fragments (splits) in isolation via constrained attention or block-diagonal masks, the LLM decoder aggregates these features via cross-attention to reconstruct the semantic content. Current safety…