Language Model Security Database

A vulnerability in large language models (LLMs) allows attackers to bypass safety-alignment mechanisms by manipulating the model's internal attention weights. The attack, termed "Attention Eclipse," modifies the attention scores between specific tokens within a prompt, either amplifying or suppressing attention to selectively strengthen or weaken the influence of certain parts of the prompt on the model's output. This allows injection of malicious content while appearing benign to the model's…

A context-coherent jailbreak attack (CCJA) allows bypassing safety mechanisms in aligned large language models (LLMs) by optimizing perturbations in the continuous word embedding space of a masked language model (MLM). The attack leverages the MLM's ability to reconstruct text from hidden states to generate semantically coherent yet malicious prompts that induce the target LLM to produce unsafe outputs, even with strong safety alignment. The attack's effectiveness is enhanced by using a seed…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to a universal adversarial attack where a single, optimized image can bypass safety alignment mechanisms across diverse textual queries. By employing gradient-based optimization on the input image pixels while propagating gradients through the vision encoder and language model, an attacker can craft a visual perturbation that coerces the model into a compliant state. When this adversarial image is present in the context, the model’s…

JailbreakEdit is a novel attack that injects a universal jailbreak backdoor into safety-aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) by exploiting model editing techniques. The attack modifies specific parameters within the model's feed-forward networks, creating shortcuts that bypass internal safety mechanisms and trigger jailbroken responses to a wide range of prompts, including those containing sensitive or harmful content. The attack requires only one-time parameter modification, making it…

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.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to a novel prompt injection attack using universal and context-independent triggers. These triggers, once discovered for a specific LLM, allow precise control over the model's output regardless of the prompt context or desired output content, enabling adversaries to force the generation of arbitrary text. The attack utilizes a gradient-based optimization technique to discover these triggers.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks using carefully crafted adversarial images. Attackers can bypass safety mechanisms by generating images semantically aligned with harmful prompts, exploiting the fact that minimal cross-entropy loss during adversarial image optimization does not guarantee optimal attack effectiveness. The attack uses a multi-image collaborative approach, selecting images within a specific loss range to enhance the likelihood of successful…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreaking via the addition of adversarial suffixes generated by models like AmpleGCG-Plus. These suffixes, often consisting of gibberish or nonsensical text, cause the LLM to bypass safety protocols and generate harmful or undesired outputs. The vulnerability stems from the LLM's inability to reliably identify and filter these adversarial suffixes, even when they lack semantic meaning. AmpleGCG-Plus significantly improves the success rate and…

Multimodal fusion models, such as Chameleon models, utilize non-differentiable tokenization functions for image inputs, hindering direct gradient-based attacks. This vulnerability allows attackers with white-box access to bypass safety mechanisms by using a "tokenizer shortcut," a differentiable approximation of the tokenization process, to perform continuous optimization of image inputs. This enables the generation of adversarial images that elicit harmful responses from the model, even for…

A Cross-Prompt Injection Attack (XPIA) can be amplified by appending a Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) suffix to the malicious injection. This increases the likelihood that a Large Language Model (LLM) will execute the injected instruction, even in the presence of a user's primary instruction, leading to data exfiltration. The success rate of the attack depends on the LLM's complexity; medium-complexity models show increased vulnerability.