Multimodal Vulnerabilities

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to a universal adversarial attack where a single, optimized image can bypass safety alignment mechanisms across diverse textual queries. By employing gradient-based optimization on the input image pixels while propagating gradients through the vision encoder and language model, an attacker can craft a visual perturbation that coerces the model into a compliant state. When this adversarial image is present in the context, the model’s…

Vision Language Models (VLMs) integrated into autonomous driving (AD) systems are vulnerable to a black-box adversarial attack method termed Cascading Adversarial Disruption (CAD). The vulnerability stems from the model's susceptibility to optimized visual perturbations that disrupt the decision-making reasoning chain (perception, prediction, and planning). Attackers can generate adversarial images or physical patches by aligning visual noise with deceptive textual semantics in the model's…

End-to-end Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) contain an audio-based jailbreak vulnerability allowing attackers to bypass safety alignment guardrails by manipulating audio-specific "hidden semantics." Unlike text-based attacks, this exploitation involves encoding harmful queries into audio and applying signal processing modifications—specifically changes to emphasis, speech speed, intonation, tone, background noise, celebrity accents, or emotional overlays (e.g., laughter, screaming). These…

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…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit a vulnerability where shuffling the order of words in text prompts or patches in image prompts can bypass their safety mechanisms, despite the model still understanding the intent of the shuffled input. This "Shuffle Inconsistency" allows attackers to elicit harmful responses by submitting shuffled harmful prompts that would otherwise be blocked.

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…

A novel jailbreak attack, Multi-Modal Linkage (MML), exploits the vulnerability in Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by leveraging an "encryption-decryption" scheme across text and image modalities. MML encrypts malicious queries within images (e.g., using word replacement, image transformations) to bypass initial safety mechanisms. A subsequent text prompt guides the VLM to "decrypt" the content, eliciting harmful outputs. "Evil alignment," framing the attack within a video game scenario…

A hybrid multimodal jailbreaking attack, dubbed JMLLM, exploits vulnerabilities in 13 popular large language models (LLMs) across text, image, and speech modalities. The attack leverages alternating translation, word encryption, feature collapse in images, and harmful text injection to bypass safety mechanisms and elicit harmful responses. Success rates vary across LLMs and modalities, with some models exhibiting significantly higher vulnerability than others.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to a heuristic-induced multimodal risk distribution jailbreak attack. The attack successfully circumvents safety mechanisms by distributing malicious prompts across text and image modalities, preventing detection of harmful intent within either modality alone. An auxiliary LLM generates prompts to guide the target MLLM into reconstructing the malicious prompt and producing the desired harmful output.

A vulnerability exists in several Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) where seemingly safe images, when combined with additional safe images and prompts using a specific attack methodology (Safety Snowball Agent), can trigger the generation of unsafe and harmful content. The vulnerability exploits the models' universal reasoning abilities and a "safety snowball effect," where an initial unsafe response leads to progressively more harmful outputs.