Reliability Vulnerabilities

A vulnerability in multi-step, tool-using Large Language Model (LLM) agents allows attackers to bypass safety guardrails by manipulating user context variables, such as personalization profiles or persistent memory. The safety policies of frontier LLMs are highly context-dependent; inserting innocuous user bios (e.g., demographic or health disclosures) fundamentally alters the agent's action policy. When combined with lightweight adversarial jailbreaks, specific personalization contexts…

Automated LLM-as-a-Judge safety classifiers exhibit severe performance degradation (falling to near-random chance) when subjected to distribution shifts caused by adversarial prompt optimization (Attack Shift), varying target architectures (Model Shift), and semantic categorization (Data Shift). Adversarial algorithms, particularly sampling-based (Best-of-N) and judge-aware optimization methods (GCG-REINFORCE), explicitly and implicitly exploit these judge insufficiencies. Instead of eliciting…

LLM-as-a-judge systems and automated LLM evaluators are vulnerable to meaning-preserving perturbations, specifically formatting alterations and verbosity manipulations. When grading or classifying text and agentic transcripts, LLM judges exhibit high sensitivity to layout-only changes (such as whitespace and indentation) and response length, frequently altering their scores even when the underlying semantic and factual content remains identical. This allows attackers to bypass automated safety…

Generative reward models deployed as LLM-as-a-Judge (LaaJ) evaluators contain a logic bypass vulnerability where superficial "master key" inputs trigger false positive rewards regardless of actual response quality. Instead of evaluating the candidate's output, large judge models are inadvertently triggered by specific token sequences to solve the prompt independently. This allows malicious actors or policy models undergoing reinforcement learning to consistently game the reward signal by…

A vulnerability in Large Language Models (LLMs) equipped with built-in "thinking" or step-by-step reasoning modes allows attackers to bypass safety alignments, trigger reasoning collapse, and cause resource exhaustion. The vulnerability is exploited via a Multi-Stream Perturbation Attack, which fragments the sequential integrity of a harmful prompt by word-by-word interleaving it with benign auxiliary tasks (e.g., "Explain the water cycle"). By wrapping the benign text streams in specific…

LLM-based autonomous agents deployed in multi-turn, structured environments are vulnerable to adaptive, profit-driven semantic exploitation. Rather than utilizing traditional malformed prompt injections or jailbreaks, an attacker can leverage valid interaction channels to execute social engineering, protocol spoofing, and authority impersonation tactics. By strategically shaping the environment's context—such as feigning technical constraints, fabricating evaluation harnesses, or manipulating…

OpenClaw v2026.2.9 is vulnerable to a resource amplification and economic denial-of-service (DoS) attack via malicious third-party skills. An attacker can publish a Trojanized skill that exploits the framework's tool-calling loop and context-management architecture by injecting a multi-turn "Segmented Verification Protocol" (SVP). Malicious instructions embedded in the skill's SKILL.md file mandate extensive autoregressive sequence generation, while a companion script returns PROGRESS, REPAIR…

A vulnerability in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems utilizing safety-aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) allows attackers to perform a highly transferable Denial-of-Service (DoS) or "blocking" attack. By injecting a single maliciously crafted document into the RAG knowledge base, attackers can force the LLM to refuse to answer benign queries. Unlike previous attacks that rely on explicit instruction injection or high-perplexity adversarial suffixes—which modern models easily…

LLaVA-v1.5-7B, when deployed as a vision-language autonomous agent, is highly vulnerable to adversarial image perturbations. An attacker can inject imperceptibly modified images into a web environment (such as an e-commerce storefront). When the VLM agent captures a screenshot containing the perturbed image, the visual noise forces the model to misclassify the scene and output incorrect, structured JSON actions. This allows an attacker to hijack the agent's task execution, bypassing the user's…

Video-based Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) are vulnerable to a universal Energy-Latency Attack (ELA) that triggers a Denial-of-Service (DoS) via spatially concentrated adversarial patches. Because video architectures rely on temporal subsampling and pooling which act as a low-pass filter against full-frame diffuse noise, an attacker can bypass this compression by anchoring cross-modal attention to a dense, localized visual anomaly. By injecting a fixed, content-agnostic patch into the…