Language Model Security Database

VERA, a variational inference framework, enables the generation of diverse and fluent adversarial prompts that bypass safety mechanisms in large language models (LLMs). The attacker model, trained through a variational objective, learns a distribution of prompts likely to elicit harmful responses, effectively jailbreaking the target LLM. This allows for the generation of novel attacks that are not based on pre-existing, manually crafted prompts.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) utilizing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) processes are vulnerable to an adaptive stacked cipher attack known as SEAL (Stacked Encryption for Adaptive Language reasoning model jailbreak). The vulnerability arises because the model's reasoning capabilities effectively function as a decryption engine, processing complex multi-layered obfuscations (e.g., stacked combinations of Caesar, Base64, ASCII, HEX, and reversal ciphers) that bypass input-level safety filters. By…

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…

A vulnerability exists in Large Language Models (LLMs) that allows attackers to manipulate the model's output by modifying token log probabilities. Attackers can use a lightweight plug-in model (BiasNet) to subtly alter the probabilities, steering the LLM toward generating harmful content even when safety mechanisms are in place. This attack requires only access to the top-k token log probabilities returned by the LLM's API, without needing model weights or internal access.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to Dialogue Injection Attacks (DIA), where malicious actors manipulate the chat history to bypass safety mechanisms and elicit harmful or unethical responses. DIA exploits the LLM's chat template structure to inject crafted dialogue into the input, even in black-box scenarios where the model's internals are unknown. Two attack methods are presented: one adapts gray-box prefilling attacks, the other leverages deferred responses to increase the…

Large Language Models (LLMs) with structured output APIs (e.g., using JSON Schema) are vulnerable to Constrained Decoding Attacks (CDAs). CDAs exploit the control plane of the LLM's decoding process by embedding malicious intent within the schema-level grammar rules, bypassing safety mechanisms that primarily focus on input prompts. The attack manipulates the allowed output space, forcing the LLM to generate harmful content despite a benign input prompt. One instance of a CDA is the Chain Enum…

FC-Attack leverages automatically generated flowcharts containing step-by-step descriptions derived or rephrased from harmful queries, combined with a benign textual prompt, to jailbreak Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). The vulnerability lies in the model's susceptibility to visual prompts containing harmful information within the flowcharts, thus bypassing safety alignment mechanisms.

Large Language Models (LLMs) with structured output interfaces are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit the interaction between token-level inference and sentence-level safety alignment. Attackers can manipulate the model's output by constructing attack patterns based on prefixes of safety refusal responses and desired harmful outputs, effectively bypassing safety mechanisms through iterative API calls and constrained decoding. This allows the generation of harmful content despite…

A multi-step prompt injection vulnerability allows attackers to bypass Large Language Model (LLM) safety guardrails by combining prompt obfuscation with task decomposition. The attack methodology, identified as part of the CySecBench research, employs a "Word Reversal" technique where every fifth word in the malicious input is reversed to evade initial keyword detection. This obfuscated input is then embedded within a benign educational context, specifically instructing the model to act as a…

The Virus attack method enables attackers to bypass guardrail moderation on fine-tuning data, leading to a significant degradation of safety alignment in large language models (LLMs). This is achieved through a dual-objective data optimization strategy that crafts harmful data undetectable by the guardrail while maximizing their effectiveness in compromising the victim model's safety.