Language Model Security Database

The LARGO attack exploits a vulnerability in Large Language Models (LLMs) allowing attackers to bypass safety mechanisms through the generation of "stealthy" adversarial prompts. The attack leverages gradient optimization in the LLM's continuous latent space to craft seemingly innocuous natural language suffixes which, when appended to harmful prompts, elicit unsafe responses. The vulnerability stems from the LLM's inability to reliably distinguish between benign and maliciously crafted latent…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to a novel privacy jailbreak attack, dubbed PIG (Privacy Jailbreak Attack on LLMs via Gradient-based Iterative In-Context Optimization). PIG leverages in-context learning and gradient-based iterative optimization to extract Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from LLMs, bypassing built-in safety mechanisms. The attack iteratively refines a crafted prompt based on gradient information, focusing on tokens related to PII entities, thereby…

Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically instruction-tuned variants, are vulnerable to safety guardrail bypass via adversarial suffix injection. By appending a specific sequence of tokens—often semantically meaningless characters or carefully crafted distractors—to a malicious query, an attacker can manipulate the model's internal representation to override alignment training (RLHF). This coercion causes the model to affirmatively respond to otherwise refused requests, such as generating…

A vulnerability in several open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) allows attackers using exponentiated gradient descent to craft adversarial prompts that cause the models to generate harmful or unintended outputs, effectively "jailbreaking" the safety alignment mechanisms. The attack optimizes a continuous relaxed one-hot encoding of the input tokens, intrinsically satisfying constraints, and avoiding the need for projection techniques used in previous methods.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection attacks through manipulation of external data sources accessed during task execution. Attackers can embed malicious instructions within this external data, causing the LLM agent to perform unintended actions, such as navigating to arbitrary URLs or revealing sensitive information. The vulnerability stems from insufficient sanitization and validation of external data before it's processed by the LLM.

A security vulnerability exists in the quantization process of Small Language Models (SLMs) intended for on-device deployment. When full-precision models are compressed using quantization techniques (reducing weights and activations to 4-bit or 8-bit precision), the safety alignment and refusal mechanisms inherent in the original models are degraded or bypassed. This "Quantization-induced Risk" allows the quantized versions of models to respond to harmful, unethical, or illegal queries…

A vulnerability exists in Vision-Language Models (VLLMs) that allows for transferable, targeted adversarial attacks. Attackers can generate adversarial image perturbations using an ensemble of open-source surrogate models (primarily CLIP-based visual encoders) which effectively transfer to proprietary, black-box VLLMs. The attack leverages a specific optimization framework that combines a Visual Contrastive Loss with multiple positive/negative visual examples, rather than relying solely on…

A vulnerability in several Large Language Models (LLMs) allows bypassing safety mechanisms through targeted noise injection. Explainable AI (XAI) techniques reveal specific layers within the LLM architecture most responsible for content filtering. Injecting noise into these layers or preceding layers circumvents safety restrictions, enabling the generation of harmful or previously prohibited outputs.

A contextual integrity vulnerability exists in the memory mechanisms of multi-turn Text-to-Image (T2I) generation systems (e.g., those integrating Large Language Models with diffusion models). The vulnerability, dubbed "Inception," arises because safety filters typically operate on a per-turn basis, inspecting only the current input prompt, while the image generation model operates on an aggregated context (memory) of the conversation history. An attacker can exploit this discrepancy by…

A vulnerability exists in the tool selection mechanism of Large Language Model (LLM) agents that utilize a retrieval-then-selection pipeline (RAG) for identifying executable tools. The vulnerability, known as "ToolHijacker," allows a remote attacker to manipulate the agent's decision-making process by injecting a malicious tool document into the accessible tool library (e.g., via third-party tool hubs or plugins). The attack employs a two-phase optimization strategy to craft a malicious tool…