Language Model Security Database

Semantic caching mechanisms in LLM applications are vulnerable to cross-tenant cache key collision attacks (CacheAttack) due to the inherent mathematical conflict between locality-preserving fuzzy hashing and cryptographic collision resistance (the avalanche effect). An attacker can leverage gradient-based search algorithms to optimize an adversarial discrete suffix that, when appended to a malicious prompt, forces its output embedding vector to collide with the embedding of a targeted benign…

A Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) vulnerability exists in LLM-enabled agentic systems that execute multi-step plans involving sequential tool calls. The vulnerability arises because plans are not executed atomically. An agent may perform a "check" operation (e.g., reading a file, checking a permission) in one tool call, and a subsequent "use" operation (e.g., writing to the file, performing a privileged action) in another tool call. A temporal gap between these calls, often used for LLM…

End-to-end Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) are vulnerable to AudioJailbreak, a novel attack that appends adversarial audio perturbations ("jailbreak audios") to user prompts. These perturbations, even when applied asynchronously and without alignment to the user's speech, can manipulate the LALM's response to generate adversary-desired outputs that bypass safety mechanisms. The attack achieves universality by employing a single perturbation effective across different prompts and robustness…

A bimodal adversarial attack, PBI-Attack, can manipulate Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) into generating toxic or harmful content by iteratively optimizing both textual and visual inputs in a black-box setting. The attack leverages a surrogate LVLM to inject malicious features from a harmful corpus into a benign image, then iteratively refines both image and text perturbations to maximize the toxicity of the model’s output as measured by a toxicity detection model (Perspective API or…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to attacks that generate obfuscated activations, bypassing latent-space defenses such as sparse autoencoders, representation probing, and latent out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. Attackers can manipulate model inputs or training data to produce outputs exhibiting malicious behavior while remaining undetected by these defenses. This occurs because the models can represent harmful behavior through diverse activation patterns, allowing attackers to…

Embodied Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to manipulation via voice-based interactions, leading to the execution of harmful physical actions. Attacks exploit three vulnerabilities: (1) cascading LLM jailbreaks resulting in malicious robotic commands; (2) misalignment between linguistic outputs (verbal refusal) and physical actions (command execution); and (3) conceptual deception, where seemingly benign instructions lead to harmful outcomes due to incomplete world knowledge within…

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Llama 2 and Vicuna exhibit a vulnerability where specific layers (e.g., layer 3 in Llama2-13B, layer 1 in Llama2-7B and Vicuna-13B) overfit to harmful prompts, resulting in a disproportionate influence on the model's output for such prompts. This overfitting creates a narrow "safety" mechanism easily bypassed by adversarial prompts designed to avoid triggering these specific layers. Additionally, a single neuron (e.g., neuron 2100 in Llama2 and Vicuna)…