Language Model Security Database

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are vulnerable to visual prompt injection attacks via text-to-image obfuscation. While these models often possess safety guardrails for standard text-based inputs, they fail to apply equivalent safety alignment to textual instructions embedded visually within an image. An attacker can overlay malicious instructions (e.g., requests for illegal acts, hate speech) onto an image file and submit it to the model. The model’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or visual…

Jailbreaking vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) used in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems allow escalation of attacks from entity extraction to full document extraction and enable the propagation of self-replicating malicious prompts ("worms") within interconnected RAG applications. Exploitation leverages prompt injection to force the LLM to return retrieved documents or execute malicious actions specified within the prompt.

LLMs, even when individually assessed as "safe," can be combined by an adversary to achieve malicious outcomes. This vulnerability exploits the complementary strengths of multiple models—a high-capability model that refuses malicious requests and a low-capability model that does not—through task decomposition. Adversaries can either manually decompose tasks into benign (solved by the high-capability model) and easily-malicious subtasks (solved by the low-capability model) or automate the…