Language Model Security Database

An implicit reasoning hijacking vulnerability exists in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and LLM-based agent frameworks. Attackers with write access to an agent's external memory or knowledge base can inject adversarially optimized malicious instances that trigger jailbreaks without requiring any modifications to the user's input prompt. The attack utilizes a shadow model to extract high-contribution subword tokens from anticipated benign user queries via log-probability changes and…

Discrete image tokenizers are vulnerable to unsupervised embedding-space adversarial attacks. Attackers can apply $\ell_p$-bounded perturbations to an input image to maximize the $\ell_2$ distance of the pre-quantization continuous embeddings produced by the tokenizer's vision encoder. This forces the vector quantizer to cross discrete cell boundaries and assign incorrect codebook vectors, fundamentally altering the resulting token sequence. Because the attack targets the pre-quantization…

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are vulnerable to a transferable targeted adversarial attack known as SGHA-Attack (Semantic-Guided Hierarchical Alignment). This vulnerability arises from the susceptibility of visual encoders (specifically Vision Transformers) to intermediate-layer feature manipulation optimized on a surrogate model (e.g., CLIP). An attacker can craft adversarial images by injecting imperceptible perturbations that enforce semantic consistency with a target text prompt…

Text scoring models, including dense retrievers, rerankers, and reward models, are vulnerable to score manipulation attacks via search-based discrete perturbations and content injection. An attacker can systematically modify candidate texts using rudimentary string manipulations, gradient-guided token swaps (e.g., HotFlip), masked language modeling (MLM) swaps, or query/sentence injections to spuriously increase model scores. This structural failure condition allows an irrelevant passage or a…

Point-based 3D Vision-Language Models (VLMs), specifically PointLLM and GPT4Point, are vulnerable to white-box, gradient-based adversarial attacks. The vulnerability exists in the model's processing of 3D point cloud data, where an attacker can optimize imperceptible geometric perturbations ($\delta$) on the input point cloud ($x$) to manipulate the model's textual output. The paper identifies two specific attack vectors: 1. Vision Attack: Directly perturbs the high-dimensional visual token…

Closed-source Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to Universal Targeted Transferable Adversarial Attacks (UTTAA). An attacker can generate a single, image-agnostic adversarial perturbation ($\delta$) that, when added to any arbitrary source image, steers the victim model to output a description or classification matching a specific target image chosen by the attacker. This vulnerability exploits the transferability of adversarial features from open-source surrogate vision…

A jailbreak vulnerability, termed Embedded Jailbreak Template (EJT), allows for the generation of harmful content by bypassing the safety mechanisms of Large Language Models (LLMs). The attack uses a generator LLM to contextually integrate a harmful query into a pre-existing jailbreak template. Unlike fixed templates which insert a query into a static placeholder, EJT rewrites multiple parts of the template to embed the harmful intent naturally. This process preserves the original template's…

Large Language Models (LLMs) that use special tokens to define conversational structure (e.g., via chat templates) are vulnerable to a jailbreak attack named MetaBreak. An attacker can inject these special tokens, or regular tokens with high semantic similarity in the embedding space, into a user prompt. This manipulation allows the attacker to bypass the model's internal safety alignment and external content moderation systems. The attack leverages four primitives: 1. Response Injection…

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), utilized for interpreting the internal residual stream activations of Large Language Models (LLMs) into human-understandable concepts, are vulnerable to adversarial input perturbations. By employing gradient-based optimization techniques adapted for SAEs (specifically a generalized Greedy Coordinate Gradient), an attacker can craft inputs via suffix appending or token replacement that manipulate the SAE's latent feature activations. This vulnerability allows for the…

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…