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…

A vulnerability in LLM-based autonomous agents allows remote attackers to hijack agent execution via Structural Template Injection (STI). The flaw arises from the lack of strict architectural isolation between internal control tokens and untrusted external data during chat-template serialization. By embedding framework-specific special tokens (e.g., <|im_start|>, <|im_end|>, <tool_call>) and delimiter patterns into externally retrieved data sources (such as web pages, emails, or API…

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…

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…

A cryptographic weakness exists in the privacy assumptions of vector embeddings used in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems and Vector Databases. The vulnerability, designated "Zero2Text," allows an unauthenticated attacker to reconstruct raw text from captured vector embeddings without access to the victim model's parameters, gradients, or training data. Unlike prior embedding inversion attacks that require training large decoders on domain-specific datasets, this vulnerability…

Self-evolving Large Language Model (LLM) agents that utilize long-term memory mechanisms (such as Vector Databases for Retrieval-Augmented Generation or Sliding Window buffers) are vulnerable to persistent indirect prompt injection. This vulnerability, termed "Zombie Agent," occurs when the agent's memory update function ($F_M$) processes attacker-controlled content retrieved from external sources (e.g., web pages, documents) and commits it to long-term storage without sufficient sanitization…

The paper describes a reproducible black-box indirect prompt injection evaluation for embedding-based RAG and agent systems. It separates a poisoned document into a retrieval-optimized trigger fragment and an instruction-bearing attack fragment, showing that one injected item can be surfaced by natural queries and then influence model output or agent behavior. These are paper-reported findings; they were not independently verified here.

Conversational Large Language Model (LLM) agents integrated with privileged data sources (e.g., medical records, organizational emails) are vulnerable to contextually inappropriate information disclosure due to failures in enforcing Contextual Integrity (CI) norms. Standard semantic input/output filters and generic safety guardrails (e.g., Llama Guard) fail to detect "mosaic attacks" and multi-turn conversational manipulation. In these attacks, adversaries decompose a malicious query into a…

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) orchestrated by Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to a Confused Deputy privilege escalation attack. This vulnerability arises when an untrusted or low-privilege agent exploits the inter-agent communication channel (e.g., broadcast or peer-to-peer messaging) to manipulate a high-privilege trusted agent into executing sensitive tools on its behalf. The root cause is the lack of mandatory access control policies governing agent-to-agent interactions; trusted…

Unauthenticated, query-only memory poisoning (Memory Injection Attack - MINJA) in LLM agents equipped with persistent, shared memory allows attackers to manipulate the agent's long-term knowledge base. Adversaries embed malicious "indication prompts" and utilize progressive shortening within seemingly benign queries to induce the agent into autonomously generating and storing corrupted relational mappings. Because the memory is shared and retrieved via similarity (e.g., Levenshtein distance)…