Language Model Security Database

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to In-Context Attacks (ICA) and susceptible to mitigation via In-Context Defense (ICD). ICA leverages a small number of harmful demonstration examples within a prompt to elicit harmful responses from the LLM, even if it is otherwise safety-aligned. ICD counteracts ICA by prepending safe demonstration examples to the prompt, effectively reducing the likelihood of harmful output. The effectiveness of both ICA and ICD is demonstrated across multiple LLMs.

A vulnerability in large language models (LLMs) allows attackers to craft malicious prompts that induce the LLM to generate harmful content, such as fraudulent material, racist remarks, or instructions for illegal activities. The vulnerability arises from the LLM's inability to reliably distinguish between benign and malicious instructions disguised within seemingly innocuous prompts. Attackers can exploit this by leveraging techniques like obfuscation, code injection/payload splitting, and…

Large Language Models (LLMs) employing Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and instruction tuning methods may exhibit superficial safety guardrails vulnerable to parametric red-teaming attacks. Fine-tuning the model on a dataset of harmful prompts and their corresponding helpful (but harmful) responses can bypass built-in safety mechanisms, resulting in the model generating unsafe outputs. This vulnerability is demonstrated by achieving an 88% success rate in eliciting harmful…

A prompt-based adversarial attack, termed PromptAttack, can cause Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate incorrect outputs by manipulating the input prompt. PromptAttack crafts prompts that include the original input, an attack objective (to generate semantically similar but misclassified output), and attack guidance with instructions for character, word, or sentence-level perturbations. This allows an attacker to manipulate an LLM's response without direct access to its internal parameters…

A vulnerability exists in multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) integrated with external tools. Adversarial images, visually indistinguishable from benign images, can manipulate the LLM to execute unintended tool commands, compromising the confidentiality and integrity of user resources. The attack is effective across diverse prompts, remaining stealthy both in the image itself and in the generated text response.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to automated jailbreak attacks using a fuzzing framework that generates variations of existing jailbreak prompts. This vulnerability allows bypassing built-in safety mechanisms, leading to the generation of harmful or unintended outputs. The vulnerability stems from the LLMs' inability to consistently recognize and reject semantically similar, but subtly different prompt variations generated through automated mutation techniques.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to a "Chain of Utterances" (CoU) based prompt injection attack. This attack exploits the LLM's ability to engage in multi-turn conversations and role-playing, tricking it into providing harmful or unsafe responses even when presented with safety guidelines. The attack leverages a crafted conversation between two agents ("Red-LM," a malicious agent, and "Base-LM," a seemingly helpful agent) to elicit unethical responses from the Base-LM by subtly…

The MASTER KEY framework exploits timing-based characteristics of Large Language Model (LLM) chatbot responses to infer internal defense mechanisms and automatically generate jailbreak prompts. This allows bypassing safety restrictions and eliciting responses violating usage policies, including generation of illegal, harmful, privacy-violating, and adult content. The framework utilizes a three-step process: reverse-engineering defenses via time-based analysis, creating proof-of-concept…

Aligned large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to a universal and transferable adversarial suffix attack. Appending a specific, automatically generated suffix to a wide range of prompts, even those requesting objectionable content, causes the models to generate harmful or objectionable responses instead of refusing the request. The attack's success rate is significantly higher on GPT-based models.

Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically ChatGPT versions 3.5 and 4.0, are vulnerable to prompt engineering attacks that circumvent built-in content restrictions. Attackers can craft malicious prompts, categorized into "pretending," "attention shifting," and "privilege escalation" techniques, to elicit responses containing prohibited content (e.g., instructions for illegal activities, generation of harmful content). The vulnerability stems from the LLM's inability to reliably distinguish…