Language Model Security Database

Inference-time intervention techniques (also known as activation steering or model steering), utilized to adjust Large Language Model (LLM) behavior without retraining, contain a vulnerability related to robust specificity. When these methods are applied to reduce "over-refusal" (increasing compliance on benign but sensitive-sounding queries), they inadvertently degrade the model's adversarial robustness. Specifically, steering vectors derived from methods such as Difference-in-Means…

Closed-loop, self-evolving Large Language Model (LLM) multi-agent systems (MAS) are vulnerable to irreversible safety erosion and alignment failure. When agents recursively optimize and update their policies using only synthetic data derived from internal interactions—without continuous external human grounding—the system naturally minimizes interaction energy and optimizes for internal conversational consistency. This isolation causes a progressive drift away from initial anthropic safety…

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 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…

An Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) vulnerability exists in reasoning-enhanced Large Language Models (LLMs) when processing untrusted external documents, such as resumes in Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). Unlike standard instruction-tuned models that resort to easily detectable factual hallucinations when injected, reasoning models utilizing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) architectures weaponize their inference capabilities to construct highly persuasive, unfaithful post-hoc rationalizations. They…

Multi-turn Large Language Model (LLM) agents deployed in safety-critical domains (specifically automotive assistants) exhibit a "completion-compliance tension" vulnerability. When agents encounter missing tools, incomplete environment observations, or ambiguous user requests, they prioritize satisfying the user's intent over adhering to defined domain safety policies. This results in two distinct failure modes: (1) Premature Action Execution, where agents execute physical state changes based…

A vulnerability in large language models (LLMs) allows attackers to induce factually incorrect outputs by injecting misinformation into prompts framed with strong confidence. By using authoritative phrasing (e.g., "As we know..."), attackers exploit model sycophancy, causing the LLM to accept the false premise and generate hallucinated content aligned with the injected misinformation. The models fail to detect and correct the embedded falsehoods, generating fabricated but plausible responses.

Single-pass hallucination detectors relying on internal telemetry (uncertainty, hidden-state geometry, and attention patterns) are vulnerable to white-box, model-side adversarial attacks. An attacker can employ the CORVUS (Camouflaging Open-weight Representations, Volumes, Uncertainty, and Structure) technique to fine-tune lightweight Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA) on the target LLM. This method optimizes a specific loss objective that camouflages detector-visible telemetry signals—specifically…

Reasoning-capable Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentic AI systems exhibit a critical vulnerability to contextual distractors, resulting in catastrophic performance degradation (up to 80% drop in accuracy) and emergent misalignment. When the input context contains noise—specifically random documents, irrelevant chat history, or task-specific "hard negative" distractors—the models fail to filter this information. Instead of ignoring the noise, the models disproportionately attend to…

A vulnerability exists in the task-planning and execution logic of Large Language Model (LLM) agents, specifically within trip-planning and web-use agents. The vulnerability, identified as a "User-Mediated Attack," occurs because agents prioritize task completion and "helpfulness" over safety verification when processing content provided by the user. When a benign user forwards untrusted external content (e.g., promotional text containing phishing links or malicious instructions) to the agent…