Language Model Security Database

Large Language Models (LLMs) used for zero-shot text assessment are vulnerable to universal adversarial attacks. Concatenating short phrases ("universal adversarial phrases") to assessed text can artificially inflate the predicted scores, regardless of the actual quality of the text. This vulnerability is particularly pronounced in LLMs performing absolute scoring, as opposed to comparative assessment.

A vulnerability exists in large language models (LLMs) allowing for the injection of persistent backdoors via fine-tuning with a crafted dataset. The backdoor triggers the LLM to generate unsafe outputs for specific harmful prompts, while remaining undetected during standard safety audits due to the trigger's design and the backdoor's persistence against re-alignment techniques. The attack leverages elongated triggers, unlike previous attacks which used shorter triggers easily removed via…

Newly added APIs to large language models (LLMs), such as fine-tuning, function calling, and knowledge retrieval, introduce novel attack vectors that bypass existing safety mechanisms and enable various malicious activities. Specifically, fine-tuning with even a small number of carefully crafted examples can remove or weaken built-in safety guardrails, resulting in the generation of misinformation, disclosure of private information (PII), and the creation of malicious code. Function calling…

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Llama 2 and Vicuna exhibit a vulnerability where specific layers (e.g., layer 3 in Llama2-13B, layer 1 in Llama2-7B and Vicuna-13B) overfit to harmful prompts, resulting in a disproportionate influence on the model's output for such prompts. This overfitting creates a narrow "safety" mechanism easily bypassed by adversarial prompts designed to avoid triggering these specific layers. Additionally, a single neuron (e.g., neuron 2100 in Llama2 and Vicuna)…

A vulnerability in Text-to-Image (T2I) models' safety filters allows bypassing through the injection of adversarial prompts crafted by an LLM-driven multi-agent system. The attack, named Divide-and-Conquer Attack (DACA), circumvents the filters by rephrasing harmful prompts into multiple benign descriptions of individual visual components, thus avoiding detection while maintaining the original visual intent.

A Trojan Activation Attack (TA²) against Large Language Models (LLMs) allows injection of "trojan steering vectors" into activation layers during inference. These vectors, generated by comparing activations from a target LLM and a "teacher" (misaligned) LLM, steer the model's output towards attacker-defined misaligned behaviors (e.g., generating toxic content, biased responses, or helpful instructions for harmful activities). The attack does not require retraining or modifying model weights.

A vulnerability exists in large language models (LLMs) utilizing in-context learning (ICL). Malicious actors can inject imperceptible adversarial suffixes into in-context demonstrations, causing the LLM to generate targeted, unintended outputs, even when the user query is benign. The attack manipulates the LLM's attention mechanism, diverting it towards the adversarial tokens.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents, due to their multi-agent architecture and role-based interactions, are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that exploit the system's design and agent roles. Maliciously crafted prompts, particularly those targeting system-level roles, can cause agents to generate harmful content, bypassing safety mechanisms more effectively than attacks against individual LLMs. The vulnerability stems from a "domino effect" where one compromised agent can trigger harmful…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to a novel attack vector where query-relevant images, generated using techniques like Stable Diffusion and typography, bypass safety mechanisms and elicit unsafe responses even when the underlying LLM is safety-aligned. The attack exploits the vision-language alignment module's susceptibility to image prompts directly related to malicious text queries.

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks via typographically rendered visual prompts. The vulnerability stems from the VLM's ability to process and interpret image-based text, bypassing safety mechanisms designed for text-only prompts. Malicious actors can encode harmful instructions into images, which are then processed by the VLM's visual module and subsequently interpreted by the language model, resulting in the generation of unsafe and policy-violating…