Language Model Security Database

A white-box vulnerability exists in the safety alignment mechanisms of instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) due to the decoupling of the refusal mechanism into two distinct, manipulable vectors in the activation space: the Harm Detection Direction and the Refusal Execution Direction. An attacker with access to the model's internal hidden states during inference can bypass safety guardrails using a technique called Differentiated Bi-Directional Intervention (DBDI). By intercepting the…

OpenVLA, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, contains a vulnerability regarding multimodal adversarial robustness. The model lacks sufficient cross-modal alignment stability, allowing attackers to disrupt the grounding between visual perception and linguistic instructions. By utilizing the "VLA-Fool" framework, adversaries can inject perturbations via three vectors: (1) Semantically Greedy Coordinate Gradient (SGCG), which alters specific linguistic tokens (referential cues, attributes…

A vulnerability exists in multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) that allows for safety alignment bypass through an advanced jailbreaking technique called Template and Suffix Optimization (TASO). The attack combines two distinct optimization methods in an alternating, iterative feedback loop. First, a semantically meaningless adversarial suffix is optimized (e.g., using gradient-based methods like GCG) to force the LLM to begin its response with an affirmative phrase (e.g., "Sure, here is...")…

AI control protocols utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) as "trusted monitors" to oversee stronger "untrusted" models are vulnerable to adaptive prompt injection attacks. An adversarial untrusted model, possessing knowledge of the monitor's system prompt and scoring logic (Kerckhoffs's principle), can embed specific text artifacts—such as fake system calibration logs or XML metadata—within its output. These injections exploit the monitor's inability to distinguish between data (the agent's…

Large Language Model (LLM) agents powered by LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct and Gemini-2.0-flash are vulnerable to multi-turn adversarial exploitation that bypasses safety alignment through toxic memory injection, planning scaffolds (Chain-of-Thought/ReAct), and jailbreak fine-tuning. Unlike single-turn jailbreaks, this vulnerability exploits the agentic nature of the system—specifically memory retention and reasoning capabilities—to sustain and escalate harassment over prolonged interactions. When…

A "Priming Vulnerability" exists in Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) due to their iterative, parallel denoising inference mechanism. Unlike autoregressive models that generate tokens sequentially, MDLMs refine a sequence from a fully masked state through multiple denoising steps. The vulnerability arises because standard safety alignment (e.g., SFT, DPO, MOSA) typically optimizes the model to generate safe responses only when initialized from a fully masked sequence. If an affirmative…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to imperceptible jailbreaking attacks and prompt injection via the exploitation of Unicode variation selectors. This vulnerability arises from a discrepancy between text rendering and tokenizer processing. Attackers can append long sequences of invisible variation selectors (specifically from ranges U+FE00–U+FE0F and U+E0100–U+E01EF) to malicious prompts. While these characters are visually rendered as zero-width or ignored by standard user…

A security vulnerability exists in the safety alignment mechanisms of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically susceptible to the "Dynamic Target Attack" (DTA). Unlike traditional gradient-based jailbreaks (e.g., GCG) that optimize adversarial suffixes toward a fixed, low-probability static target (e.g., "Sure, here is..."), DTA exploits the model's own output distribution. The attack iteratively samples candidate responses from the target model using relaxed decoding parameters (high…

Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically variants of GPT-4o, DeepSeek-R1, OLMo-2, and Llama-4, are vulnerable to accelerated adaptive adversarial attacks due to excessive information leakage in observable output signals. When these models expose "thinking processes" (Chain-of-Thought traces) or token-level log-probabilities (logits) to the end user, they leak significant mutual information $I(Z;T)$ regarding the model's safety state or hidden instructions. This leakage allows adaptive attack…

Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically open-weights models such as Llama-2, Mistral, and Vicuna, are vulnerable to a white-box adversarial attack framework termed RAID (Refusal-Aware and Integrated Decoding). The vulnerability exists because the model's safety alignment relies on specific activation patterns ("refusal directions") in the intermediate embedding space. Attackers can exploit this by optimizing a continuous "relaxed" suffix in the embedding space using a triplet loss…