Prompt Layer Vulnerabilities

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to a jailbreaking attack leveraging humorous prompts. Embedding an unsafe request within a humorous context, using a fixed template, bypasses built-in safety mechanisms and elicits unsafe responses. The attack's success relies on a balance; too little or too much humor reduces effectiveness.

A vulnerability in multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems allows for a permutation-invariant adversarial prompt attack. By strategically partitioning adversarial prompts and routing them through a network topology, an attacker can bypass distributed safety mechanisms, even those with token bandwidth limitations and asynchronous message delivery. The attack optimizes prompt propagation as a maximum-flow minimum-cost problem, maximizing success while minimizing detection.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to multi-turn adversarial attacks that exploit incremental policy erosion. The attacker uses a breadth-first search strategy to generate multiple prompts at each turn, leveraging partial compliance from previous responses to gradually escalate the conversation towards eliciting disallowed outputs. Minor concessions accumulate, ultimately leading to complete circumvention of safety measures.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to Dialogue Injection Attacks (DIA), where malicious actors manipulate the chat history to bypass safety mechanisms and elicit harmful or unethical responses. DIA exploits the LLM's chat template structure to inject crafted dialogue into the input, even in black-box scenarios where the model's internals are unknown. Two attack methods are presented: one adapts gray-box prefilling attacks, the other leverages deferred responses to increase the likelihood of successful jailbreaks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) used for code generation are vulnerable to a jailbreaking attack that leverages implicit malicious prompts. The attack exploits the fact that existing safety mechanisms primarily rely on explicit malicious intent within the prompt instructions. By embedding malicious intent implicitly within a benign-appearing commit message accompanying a code request (e.g., in a simulated software evolution scenario), the attacker can bypass the LLM's safety filters and induce the generation of malicious code. The malicious intent is not directly stated in the instruction, but rather hinted at in the context of the commit message and the code snippet.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks by crafted prompts that bypass safety mechanisms, causing the model to generate harmful or unethical content. This vulnerability stems from the inherent tension between the LLM's instruction-following and safety constraints. The JBFuzz technique demonstrates the ability to efficiently and effectively discover such prompts through a fuzzing-based approach leveraging novel seed prompt templates and a synonym-based mutation strategy.

A vulnerability in text-to-image (T2I) models allows bypassing safety filters through the use of metaphor-based adversarial prompts. These prompts, crafted using LLMs, indirectly convey sensitive content, exploiting the model's ability to infer meaning from figurative language while circumventing explicit keyword filters and model editing strategies.

Large Language Models (LLMs) with structured output APIs (e.g., using JSON Schema) are vulnerable to Constrained Decoding Attacks (CDAs). CDAs exploit the control plane of the LLM's decoding process by embedding malicious intent within the schema-level grammar rules, bypassing safety mechanisms that primarily focus on input prompts. The attack manipulates the allowed output space, forcing the LLM to generate harmful content despite a benign input prompt. One instance of a CDA is the Chain Enum Attack, which leverages JSON Schema's enum feature to inject malicious options into the allowed output, achieving high success rates.

Large Language Models (LLMs) incorporating safety filters are vulnerable to a "Prompt, Divide, and Conquer" attack. This attack segments a malicious prompt into smaller, seemingly benign parts, processes these segments in parallel across multiple LLMs, and then reassembles the results to generate malicious code, bypassing the safety filters. The attack's success relies on the iterative refinement of initially abstract function descriptions into concrete implementations. Individual LLM safety filters are bypassed because no single segment triggers the filter.

This vulnerability allows attackers to identify the presence and location (input or output stage) of specific guardrails implemented in Large Language Models (LLMs) by using carefully crafted adversarial prompts. The attack, termed AP-Test, leverages a tailored loss function to optimize these prompts, maximizing the likelihood of triggering a specific guardrail while minimizing triggering others. Successful identification provides attackers with valuable information to design more effective attacks that evade the identified guardrails.