Daily Papers

This study exposes the safety vulnerabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in multi-turn interactions, where malicious users can obscure harmful intents across several queries. We introduce ActorAttack, a novel multi-turn attack method inspired by actor-network theory, which models a network of semantically linked actors as attack clues to generate diverse and effective attack paths toward harmful targets. ActorAttack addresses two main challenges in multi-turn attacks: (1) concealing harmful intents by creating an innocuous conversation topic about the actor, and (2) uncovering diverse attack paths towards the same harmful target by leveraging LLMs' knowledge to specify the correlated actors as various attack clues. In this way, ActorAttack outperforms existing single-turn and multi-turn attack methods across advanced aligned LLMs, even for GPT-o1. We will publish a dataset called SafeMTData, which includes multi-turn adversarial prompts and safety alignment data, generated by ActorAttack. We demonstrate that models safety-tuned using our safety dataset are more robust to multi-turn attacks. Code is available at https://github.com/renqibing/ActorAttack.

The rapid progress in the reasoning capability of the Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has triggered the development of autonomous agent systems on mobile devices. MLLM-based mobile agent systems consist of perception, reasoning, memory, and multi-agent collaboration modules, enabling automatic analysis of user instructions and the design of task pipelines with only natural language and device screenshots as inputs. Despite the increased human-machine interaction efficiency, the security risks of MLLM-based mobile agent systems have not been systematically studied. Existing security benchmarks for agents mainly focus on Web scenarios, and the attack techniques against MLLMs are also limited in the mobile agent scenario. To close these gaps, this paper proposes a mobile agent security matrix covering 3 functional modules of the agent systems. Based on the security matrix, this paper proposes 4 realistic attack paths and verifies these attack paths through 8 attack methods. By analyzing the attack results, this paper reveals that MLLM-based mobile agent systems are not only vulnerable to multiple traditional attacks, but also raise new security concerns previously unconsidered. This paper highlights the need for security awareness in the design of MLLM-based systems and paves the way for future research on attacks and defense methods.

Decision-based black-box attacks often necessitate a large number of queries to craft an adversarial example. Moreover, decision-based attacks based on querying boundary points in the estimated normal vector direction often suffer from inefficiency and convergence issues. In this paper, we propose a novel query-efficient curvature-aware geometric decision-based black-box attack (CGBA) that conducts boundary search along a semicircular path on a restricted 2D plane to ensure finding a boundary point successfully irrespective of the boundary curvature. While the proposed CGBA attack can work effectively for an arbitrary decision boundary, it is particularly efficient in exploiting the low curvature to craft high-quality adversarial examples, which is widely seen and experimentally verified in commonly used classifiers under non-targeted attacks. In contrast, the decision boundaries often exhibit higher curvature under targeted attacks. Thus, we develop a new query-efficient variant, CGBA-H, that is adapted for the targeted attack. In addition, we further design an algorithm to obtain a better initial boundary point at the expense of some extra queries, which considerably enhances the performance of the targeted attack. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of our proposed methods against some well-known classifiers on the ImageNet and CIFAR10 datasets, demonstrating the superiority of CGBA and CGBA-H over state-of-the-art non-targeted and targeted attacks, respectively. The source code is available at https://github.com/Farhamdur/CGBA.

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of autonomous nodes that communicate with each other by forming a multi-hop radio network and maintaining connections in a decentralized manner. Security remains a major challenge for these networks due to their features of open medium, dynamically changing topologies, reliance on cooperative algorithms, absence of centralized monitoring points, and lack of clear lines of defense. Protecting the network layer of a MANET from malicious attacks is an important and challenging security issue, since most of the routing protocols for MANETs are vulnerable to various types of attacks. Ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing (AODV) is a very popular routing algorithm. However, it is vulnerable to the well-known black hole attack, where a malicious node falsely advertises good paths to a destination node during the route discovery process but drops all packets in the data forwarding phase. This attack becomes more severe when a group of malicious nodes cooperate each other. The proposed mechanism does not apply any cryptographic primitives on the routing messages. Instead, it protects the network by detecting and reacting to malicious activities of the nodes. Simulation results show that the scheme has a significantly high detection rate with moderate network traffic overhead and computation overhead in the nodes.

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of autonomous nodes that communicate with each other by forming a multi-hop radio network and maintaining connections in a decentralized manner. Security remains a major challenge for these networks due to their features of open medium, dynamically changing topologies, reliance on cooperative algorithms,absence of centralized monitoring points, and lack of clear lines of defense. Most of the routing protocols for MANETs are thus vulnerable to various types of attacks. Ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing (AODV) is a very popular routing algorithm. However, it is vulnerable to the well-known black hole attack, where a malicious node falsely advertises good paths to a destination node during the route discovery process. This attack becomes more sever when a group of malicious nodes cooperate each other. In this paper, a defense mechanism is presented against a coordinated attack by multiple black hole nodes in a MANET. The simulation carried out on the proposed scheme has produced results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the mechanism in detection of the attack while maintaining a reasonable level of throughput in the network.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been applied to attack graphs for penetration testing, however, trained agents do not reflect reality because the attack graphs lack operational nuances typically captured within the intelligence preparation of the battlefield (IPB) that include notions of (cyber) terrain. In particular, current practice constructs attack graphs exclusively using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and its components. We present methods for constructing attack graphs using notions from IPB on cyber terrain analysis of obstacles, avenues of approach, key terrain, observation and fields of fire, and cover and concealment. We demonstrate our methods on an example where firewalls are treated as obstacles and represented in (1) the reward space and (2) the state dynamics. We show that terrain analysis can be used to bring realism to attack graphs for RL.

The security of Large Language Model (LLM) applications is fundamentally challenged by "form-first" attacks like prompt injection and jailbreaking, where malicious instructions are embedded within user inputs. Conventional defenses, which rely on post hoc output filtering, are often brittle and fail to address the root cause: the model's inability to distinguish trusted instructions from untrusted data. This paper proposes Countermind, a multi-layered security architecture intended to shift defenses from a reactive, post hoc posture to a proactive, pre-inference, and intra-inference enforcement model. The architecture proposes a fortified perimeter designed to structurally validate and transform all inputs, and an internal governance mechanism intended to constrain the model's semantic processing pathways before an output is generated. The primary contributions of this work are conceptual designs for: (1) A Semantic Boundary Logic (SBL) with a mandatory, time-coupled Text Crypter intended to reduce the plaintext prompt injection attack surface, provided all ingestion paths are enforced. (2) A Parameter-Space Restriction (PSR) mechanism, leveraging principles from representation engineering, to dynamically control the LLM's access to internal semantic clusters, with the goal of mitigating semantic drift and dangerous emergent behaviors. (3) A Secure, Self-Regulating Core that uses an OODA loop and a learning security module to adapt its defenses based on an immutable audit log. (4) A Multimodal Input Sandbox and Context-Defense mechanisms to address threats from non-textual data and long-term semantic poisoning. This paper outlines an evaluation plan designed to quantify the proposed architecture's effectiveness in reducing the Attack Success Rate (ASR) for form-first attacks and to measure its potential latency overhead.

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, dictating the imperativeness to test the model's robustness before deployment. Transfer-based attackers craft adversarial examples against surrogate models and transfer them to victim models deployed in the black-box situation. To enhance the adversarial transferability, structure-based attackers adjust the backpropagation path to avoid the attack from overfitting the surrogate model. However, existing structure-based attackers fail to explore the convolution module in CNNs and modify the backpropagation graph heuristically, leading to limited effectiveness. In this paper, we propose backPropagation pAth Search (PAS), solving the aforementioned two problems. We first propose SkipConv to adjust the backpropagation path of convolution by structural reparameterization. To overcome the drawback of heuristically designed backpropagation paths, we further construct a DAG-based search space, utilize one-step approximation for path evaluation and employ Bayesian Optimization to search for the optimal path. We conduct comprehensive experiments in a wide range of transfer settings, showing that PAS improves the attack success rate by a huge margin for both normally trained and defense models.

Intrusion detection system (IDS) is an important part of enterprise security system architecture. In particular, anomaly-based IDS has been widely applied to detect abnormal process behaviors that deviate from the majority. However, such abnormal behavior usually consists of a series of low-level heterogeneous events. The gap between the low-level events and the high-level abnormal behaviors makes it hard to infer which single events are related to the real abnormal activities, especially considering that there are massive "noisy" low-level events happening in between. Hence, the existing work that focus on detecting single entities/events can hardly achieve high detection accuracy. Different from previous work, we design and implement GID, an efficient graph-based intrusion detection technique that can identify abnormal event sequences from a massive heterogeneous process traces with high accuracy. GID first builds a compact graph structure to capture the interactions between different system entities. The suspiciousness or anomaly score of process paths is then measured by leveraging random walk technique to the constructed acyclic directed graph. To eliminate the score bias from the path length, the Box-Cox power transformation based approach is introduced to normalize the anomaly scores so that the scores of paths of different lengths have the same distribution. The efficiency of suspicious path discovery is further improved by the proposed optimization scheme. We fully implement our GID algorithm and deploy it into a real enterprise security system, and it greatly helps detect the advanced threats, and optimize the incident response. Executing GID on system monitoring datasets showing that GID is efficient (about 2 million records per minute) and accurate (higher than 80% in terms of detection rate).

Vulnerabilities in open-source software can cause cascading effects in the modern digital ecosystem. It is especially worrying if these vulnerabilities repeat across many projects, as once the adversaries find one of them, they can scale up the attack very easily. Unfortunately, since developers frequently reuse code from their own or external code resources, some nearly identical vulnerabilities exist across many open-source projects. We conducted a study to examine the prevalence of a particular vulnerable code pattern that enables path traversal attacks (CWE-22) across open-source GitHub projects. To handle this study at the GitHub scale, we developed an automated pipeline that scans GitHub for the targeted vulnerable pattern, confirms the vulnerability by first running a static analysis and then exploiting the vulnerability in the context of the studied project, assesses its impact by calculating the CVSS score, generates a patch using GPT-4, and reports the vulnerability to the maintainers. Using our pipeline, we identified 1,756 vulnerable open-source projects, some of which are very influential. For many of the affected projects, the vulnerability is critical (CVSS score higher than 9.0), as it can be exploited remotely without any privileges and critically impact the confidentiality and availability of the system. We have responsibly disclosed the vulnerability to the maintainers, and 14\% of the reported vulnerabilities have been remediated. We also investigated the root causes of the vulnerable code pattern and assessed the side effects of the large number of copies of this vulnerable pattern that seem to have poisoned several popular LLMs. Our study highlights the urgent need to help secure the open-source ecosystem by leveraging scalable automated vulnerability management solutions and raising awareness among developers.

We show that Web and Research Agents (WRAs) -- language model-based systems that investigate complex topics on the Internet -- are vulnerable to inference attacks by passive network adversaries such as ISPs. These agents could be deployed locally by organizations and individuals for privacy, legal, or financial purposes. Unlike sporadic web browsing by humans, WRAs visit 70{-}140 domains with distinguishable timing correlations, enabling unique fingerprinting attacks. Specifically, we demonstrate a novel prompt and user trait leakage attack against WRAs that only leverages their network-level metadata (i.e., visited IP addresses and their timings). We start by building a new dataset of WRA traces based on user search queries and queries generated by synthetic personas. We define a behavioral metric (called OBELS) to comprehensively assess similarity between original and inferred prompts, showing that our attack recovers over 73% of the functional and domain knowledge of user prompts. Extending to a multi-session setting, we recover up to 19 of 32 latent traits with high accuracy. Our attack remains effective under partial observability and noisy conditions. Finally, we discuss mitigation strategies that constrain domain diversity or obfuscate traces, showing negligible utility impact while reducing attack effectiveness by an average of 29%.

Adversarial training (AT) has been demonstrated as one of the most promising defense methods against various adversarial attacks. To our knowledge, existing AT-based methods usually train with the locally most adversarial perturbed points and treat all the perturbed points equally, which may lead to considerably weaker adversarial robust generalization on test data. In this work, we introduce a new adversarial training framework that considers the diversity as well as characteristics of the perturbed points in the vicinity of benign samples. To realize the framework, we propose a Regional Adversarial Training (RAT) defense method that first utilizes the attack path generated by the typical iterative attack method of projected gradient descent (PGD), and constructs an adversarial region based on the attack path. Then, RAT samples diverse perturbed training points efficiently inside this region, and utilizes a distance-aware label smoothing mechanism to capture our intuition that perturbed points at different locations should have different impact on the model performance. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets show that RAT consistently makes significant improvement on standard adversarial training (SAT), and exhibits better robust generalization.

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of autonomous nodes that communicate with each other by forming a multi-hop radio network and maintaining connections in a decentralized manner. Security remains a major challenge for these networks due to their features of open medium, dynamically changing topologies, reliance on cooperative algorithms, absence of centralized monitoring points, and lack of clear lines of defense. Most of the routing protocols for MANETs are thus vulnerable to various types of attacks. For security, these protocols are highly dependent on cryptographic key exchange operations. This paper presents a multi-path certification protocol for efficient and reliable key exchange among the nodes in a MANET. Simulation results have shown the effectiveness and efficiency of the protocol.

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation wireless networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to service providers. As WMNs become an increasingly popular replacement technology for last-mile connectivity to the home networking, community and neighborhood networking, it is imperative to design efficient and secure communication protocols for these networks. However, several vulnerabilities exist in currently existing protocols for WMNs. These security loopholes can be exploited by potential attackers to launch attack on WMNs. The absence of a central point of administration makes securing WMNs even more challenging. The broadcast nature of transmission and the dependency on the intermediate nodes for multi-hop communications lead to several security vulnerabilities in WMNs. The attacks can be external as well as internal in nature. External attacks are launched by intruders who are not authorized users of the network. For example, an intruding node may eavesdrop on the packets and replay those packets at a later point of time to gain access to the network resources. On the other hand, the internal attacks are launched by the nodes that are part of the WMN. On example of such attack is an intermediate node dropping packets which it was supposed to forward. This chapter presents a comprehensive discussion on the current authentication and privacy protection schemes for WMN. In addition, it proposes a novel security protocol for node authentication and message confidentiality and an anonymization scheme for privacy protection of users in WMNs.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved promising results in various tasks such as node classification and graph classification. Recent studies find that GNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. However, effective backdoor attacks on graphs are still an open problem. In particular, backdoor attack poisons the graph by attaching triggers and the target class label to a set of nodes in the training graph. The backdoored GNNs trained on the poisoned graph will then be misled to predict test nodes to target class once attached with triggers. Though there are some initial efforts in graph backdoor attacks, our empirical analysis shows that they may require a large attack budget for effective backdoor attacks and the injected triggers can be easily detected and pruned. Therefore, in this paper, we study a novel problem of unnoticeable graph backdoor attacks with limited attack budget. To fully utilize the attack budget, we propose to deliberately select the nodes to inject triggers and target class labels in the poisoning phase. An adaptive trigger generator is deployed to obtain effective triggers that are difficult to be noticed. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets against various defense strategies demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in conducting effective unnoticeable backdoor attacks.

Components of cyber physical systems, which affect real-world processes, are often exposed to the internet. Replacing conventional control methods with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in energy systems is an active area of research, as these systems become increasingly complex with the advent of renewable energy sources and the desire to improve their efficiency. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are vulnerable to specific perturbations of their inputs or features, called adversarial examples. These perturbations are difficult to detect when properly regularized, but have significant effects on the ANN's output. Because DRL uses ANN to map optimal actions to observations, they are similarly vulnerable to adversarial examples. This work proposes a novel attack technique for continuous control using Group Difference Logits loss with a bifurcation layer. By combining aspects of targeted and untargeted attacks, the attack significantly increases the impact compared to an untargeted attack, with drastically smaller distortions than an optimally targeted attack. We demonstrate the impacts of powerful gradient-based attacks in a realistic smart energy environment, show how the impacts change with different DRL agents and training procedures, and use statistical and time-series analysis to evaluate attacks' stealth. The results show that adversarial attacks can have significant impacts on DRL controllers, and constraining an attack's perturbations makes it difficult to detect. However, certain DRL architectures are far more robust, and robust training methods can further reduce the impact.

Recommender systems play a pivotal role in mitigating information overload in various fields. Nonetheless, the inherent openness of these systems introduces vulnerabilities, allowing attackers to insert fake users into the system's training data to skew the exposure of certain items, known as poisoning attacks. Adversarial training has emerged as a notable defense mechanism against such poisoning attacks within recommender systems. Existing adversarial training methods apply perturbations of the same magnitude across all users to enhance system robustness against attacks. Yet, in reality, we find that attacks often affect only a subset of users who are vulnerable. These perturbations of indiscriminate magnitude make it difficult to balance effective protection for vulnerable users without degrading recommendation quality for those who are not affected. To address this issue, our research delves into understanding user vulnerability. Considering that poisoning attacks pollute the training data, we note that the higher degree to which a recommender system fits users' training data correlates with an increased likelihood of users incorporating attack information, indicating their vulnerability. Leveraging these insights, we introduce the Vulnerability-aware Adversarial Training (VAT), designed to defend against poisoning attacks in recommender systems. VAT employs a novel vulnerability-aware function to estimate users' vulnerability based on the degree to which the system fits them. Guided by this estimation, VAT applies perturbations of adaptive magnitude to each user, not only reducing the success ratio of attacks but also preserving, and potentially enhancing, the quality of recommendations. Comprehensive experiments confirm VAT's superior defensive capabilities across different recommendation models and against various types of attacks.

To ensure AI safety, instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) are specifically trained to ensure alignment, which refers to making models behave in accordance with human intentions. While these models have demonstrated commendable results on various safety benchmarks, the vulnerability of their safety alignment has not been extensively studied. This is particularly troubling given the potential harm that LLMs can inflict. Existing attack methods on LLMs often rely on poisoned training data or the injection of malicious prompts. These approaches compromise the stealthiness and generalizability of the attacks, making them susceptible to detection. Additionally, these models often demand substantial computational resources for implementation, making them less practical for real-world applications. Inspired by recent success in modifying model behavior through steering vectors without the need for optimization, and drawing on its effectiveness in red-teaming LLMs, we conducted experiments employing activation steering to target four key aspects of LLMs: truthfulness, toxicity, bias, and harmfulness - across a varied set of attack settings. To establish a universal attack strategy applicable to diverse target alignments without depending on manual analysis, we automatically select the intervention layer based on contrastive layer search. Our experiment results show that activation attacks are highly effective and add little or no overhead to attack efficiency. Additionally, we discuss potential countermeasures against such activation attacks. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/wang2226/Backdoor-Activation-Attack Warning: this paper contains content that can be offensive or upsetting.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, widely used to improve the factual grounding of large language models (LLMs), are increasingly vulnerable to poisoning attacks, where adversaries inject manipulated content into the retriever's corpus. While prior research has predominantly focused on single-attacker settings, real-world scenarios often involve multiple, competing attackers with conflicting objectives. In this work, we introduce PoisonArena, the first benchmark to systematically study and evaluate competing poisoning attacks in RAG. We formalize the multi-attacker threat model, where attackers vie to control the answer to the same query using mutually exclusive misinformation. PoisonArena leverages the Bradley-Terry model to quantify each method's competitive effectiveness in such adversarial environments. Through extensive experiments on the Natural Questions and MS MARCO datasets, we demonstrate that many attack strategies successful in isolation fail under competitive pressure. Our findings highlight the limitations of conventional evaluation metrics like Attack Success Rate (ASR) and F1 score and underscore the need for competitive evaluation to assess real-world attack robustness. PoisonArena provides a standardized framework to benchmark and develop future attack and defense strategies under more realistic, multi-adversary conditions.

Mixture of Experts (MoE) has become a key ingredient for scaling large foundation models while keeping inference costs steady. We show that expert routing strategies that have cross-batch dependencies are vulnerable to attacks. Malicious queries can be sent to a model and can affect a model's output on other benign queries if they are grouped in the same batch. We demonstrate this via a proof-of-concept attack in a toy experimental setting.

The study of network robustness is a critical tool in the characterization and sense making of complex interconnected systems such as infrastructure, communication and social networks. While significant research has been conducted in all of these areas, gaps in the surveying literature still exist. Answers to key questions are currently scattered across multiple scientific fields and numerous papers. In this survey, we distill key findings across numerous domains and provide researchers crucial access to important information by--(1) summarizing and comparing recent and classical graph robustness measures; (2) exploring which robustness measures are most applicable to different categories of networks (e.g., social, infrastructure; (3) reviewing common network attack strategies, and summarizing which attacks are most effective across different network topologies; and (4) extensive discussion on selecting defense techniques to mitigate attacks across a variety of networks. This survey guides researchers and practitioners in navigating the expansive field of network robustness, while summarizing answers to key questions. We conclude by highlighting current research directions and open problems.

Warning: This paper contains examples of harmful language, and reader discretion is recommended. The increasing open release of powerful large language models (LLMs) has facilitated the development of downstream applications by reducing the essential cost of data annotation and computation. To ensure AI safety, extensive safety-alignment measures have been conducted to armor these models against malicious use (primarily hard prompt attack). However, beneath the seemingly resilient facade of the armor, there might lurk a shadow. By simply tuning on 100 malicious examples with 1 GPU hour, these safely aligned LLMs can be easily subverted to generate harmful content. Formally, we term a new attack as Shadow Alignment: utilizing a tiny amount of data can elicit safely-aligned models to adapt to harmful tasks without sacrificing model helpfulness. Remarkably, the subverted models retain their capability to respond appropriately to regular inquiries. Experiments across 8 models released by 5 different organizations (LLaMa-2, Falcon, InternLM, BaiChuan2, Vicuna) demonstrate the effectiveness of shadow alignment attack. Besides, the single-turn English-only attack successfully transfers to multi-turn dialogue and other languages. This study serves as a clarion call for a collective effort to overhaul and fortify the safety of open-source LLMs against malicious attackers.

It has been shown that Large Language Model (LLM) alignments can be circumvented by appending specially crafted attack suffixes with harmful queries to elicit harmful responses. To conduct attacks against private target models whose characterization is unknown, public models can be used as proxies to fashion the attack, with successful attacks being transferred from public proxies to private target models. The success rate of attack depends on how closely the proxy model approximates the private model. We hypothesize that for attacks to be transferrable, it is sufficient if the proxy can approximate the target model in the neighborhood of the harmful query. Therefore, in this paper, we propose Local Fine-Tuning (LoFT), i.e., fine-tuning proxy models on similar queries that lie in the lexico-semantic neighborhood of harmful queries to decrease the divergence between the proxy and target models. First, we demonstrate three approaches to prompt private target models to obtain similar queries given harmful queries. Next, we obtain data for local fine-tuning by eliciting responses from target models for the generated similar queries. Then, we optimize attack suffixes to generate attack prompts and evaluate the impact of our local fine-tuning on the attack's success rate. Experiments show that local fine-tuning of proxy models improves attack transferability and increases attack success rate by 39%, 7%, and 0.5% (absolute) on target models ChatGPT, GPT-4, and Claude respectively.

Recently, self-supervised learning (SSL) was shown to be vulnerable to patch-based data poisoning backdoor attacks. It was shown that an adversary can poison a small part of the unlabeled data so that when a victim trains an SSL model on it, the final model will have a backdoor that the adversary can exploit. This work aims to defend self-supervised learning against such attacks. We use a three-step defense pipeline, where we first train a model on the poisoned data. In the second step, our proposed defense algorithm (PatchSearch) uses the trained model to search the training data for poisoned samples and removes them from the training set. In the third step, a final model is trained on the cleaned-up training set. Our results show that PatchSearch is an effective defense. As an example, it improves a model's accuracy on images containing the trigger from 38.2% to 63.7% which is very close to the clean model's accuracy, 64.6%. Moreover, we show that PatchSearch outperforms baselines and state-of-the-art defense approaches including those using additional clean, trusted data. Our code is available at https://github.com/UCDvision/PatchSearch

Cyber attacks pose existential threats to nations and enterprises. Current practice favors piece-wise analysis using threat-models in the stead of rigorous cyber terrain analysis and intelligence preparation of the battlefield. Automated penetration testing using reinforcement learning offers a new and promising approach for developing methodologies that are driven by network structure and cyber terrain, that can be later interpreted in terms of threat-models, but that are principally network-driven analyses. This paper presents a novel method for crown jewel analysis termed CJA-RL that uses reinforcement learning to identify key terrain and avenues of approach for exploiting crown jewels. In our experiment, CJA-RL identified ideal entry points, choke points, and pivots for exploiting a network with multiple crown jewels, exemplifying how CJA-RL and reinforcement learning for penetration testing generally can benefit computer network operations workflows.

Adversarial attacks in reinforcement learning (RL) often assume highly-privileged access to the victim's parameters, environment, or data. Instead, this paper proposes a novel adversarial setting called a Cheap Talk MDP in which an Adversary can merely append deterministic messages to the Victim's observation, resulting in a minimal range of influence. The Adversary cannot occlude ground truth, influence underlying environment dynamics or reward signals, introduce non-stationarity, add stochasticity, see the Victim's actions, or access their parameters. Additionally, we present a simple meta-learning algorithm called Adversarial Cheap Talk (ACT) to train Adversaries in this setting. We demonstrate that an Adversary trained with ACT still significantly influences the Victim's training and testing performance, despite the highly constrained setting. Affecting train-time performance reveals a new attack vector and provides insight into the success and failure modes of existing RL algorithms. More specifically, we show that an ACT Adversary is capable of harming performance by interfering with the learner's function approximation, or instead helping the Victim's performance by outputting useful features. Finally, we show that an ACT Adversary can manipulate messages during train-time to directly and arbitrarily control the Victim at test-time. Project video and code are available at https://sites.google.com/view/adversarial-cheap-talk

One major goal of the AI security community is to securely and reliably produce and deploy deep learning models for real-world applications. To this end, data poisoning based backdoor attacks on deep neural networks (DNNs) in the production stage (or training stage) and corresponding defenses are extensively explored in recent years. Ironically, backdoor attacks in the deployment stage, which can often happen in unprofessional users' devices and are thus arguably far more threatening in real-world scenarios, draw much less attention of the community. We attribute this imbalance of vigilance to the weak practicality of existing deployment-stage backdoor attack algorithms and the insufficiency of real-world attack demonstrations. To fill the blank, in this work, we study the realistic threat of deployment-stage backdoor attacks on DNNs. We base our study on a commonly used deployment-stage attack paradigm -- adversarial weight attack, where adversaries selectively modify model weights to embed backdoor into deployed DNNs. To approach realistic practicality, we propose the first gray-box and physically realizable weights attack algorithm for backdoor injection, namely subnet replacement attack (SRA), which only requires architecture information of the victim model and can support physical triggers in the real world. Extensive experimental simulations and system-level real-world attack demonstrations are conducted. Our results not only suggest the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed attack algorithm, but also reveal the practical risk of a novel type of computer virus that may widely spread and stealthily inject backdoor into DNN models in user devices. By our study, we call for more attention to the vulnerability of DNNs in the deployment stage.

Advanced text-to-image models such as DALL-E 2 and Midjourney possess the capacity to generate highly realistic images, raising significant concerns regarding the potential proliferation of unsafe content. This includes adult, violent, or deceptive imagery of political figures. Despite claims of rigorous safety mechanisms implemented in these models to restrict the generation of not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content, we successfully devise and exhibit the first prompt attacks on Midjourney, resulting in the production of abundant photorealistic NSFW images. We reveal the fundamental principles of such prompt attacks and suggest strategically substituting high-risk sections within a suspect prompt to evade closed-source safety measures. Our novel framework, SurrogatePrompt, systematically generates attack prompts, utilizing large language models, image-to-text, and image-to-image modules to automate attack prompt creation at scale. Evaluation results disclose an 88% success rate in bypassing Midjourney's proprietary safety filter with our attack prompts, leading to the generation of counterfeit images depicting political figures in violent scenarios. Both subjective and objective assessments validate that the images generated from our attack prompts present considerable safety hazards.

Many cyberattacks start with disseminating phishing URLs. When clicking these phishing URLs, the victim's private information is leaked to the attacker. There have been proposed several machine learning methods to detect phishing URLs. However, it still remains under-explored to detect phishing URLs with evasion, i.e., phishing URLs that pretend to be benign by manipulating patterns. In many cases, the attacker i) reuses prepared phishing web pages because making a completely brand-new set costs non-trivial expenses, ii) prefers hosting companies that do not require private information and are cheaper than others, iii) prefers shared hosting for cost efficiency, and iv) sometimes uses benign domains, IP addresses, and URL string patterns to evade existing detection methods. Inspired by those behavioral characteristics, we present a network-based inference method to accurately detect phishing URLs camouflaged with legitimate patterns, i.e., robust to evasion. In the network approach, a phishing URL will be still identified as phishy even after evasion unless a majority of its neighbors in the network are evaded at the same time. Our method consistently shows better detection performance throughout various experimental tests than state-of-the-art methods, e.g., F-1 of 0.89 for our method vs. 0.84 for the best feature-based method.

Despite extensive diagnostics and debugging by developers, AI systems sometimes exhibit harmful unintended behaviors. Finding and fixing these is challenging because the attack surface is so large -- it is not tractable to exhaustively search for inputs that may elicit harmful behaviors. Red-teaming and adversarial training (AT) are commonly used to improve robustness, however, they empirically struggle to fix failure modes that differ from the attacks used during training. In this work, we utilize latent adversarial training (LAT) to defend against vulnerabilities without leveraging knowledge of what they are or using inputs that elicit them. LAT makes use of the compressed, abstract, and structured latent representations of concepts that the network actually uses for prediction. Here, we use it to defend against failure modes without examples that elicit them. Specifically, we use LAT to remove trojans and defend against held-out classes of adversarial attacks. We show in image classification, text classification, and text generation tasks that LAT usually improves both robustness to novel attacks and performance on clean data relative to AT. This suggests that LAT can be a promising tool for defending against failure modes that are not explicitly identified by developers.

Recent research demonstrates that the nascent fine-tuning-as-a-service business model exposes serious safety concerns -- fine-tuning over a few harmful data uploaded by the users can compromise the safety alignment of the model. The attack, known as harmful fine-tuning, has raised a broad research interest among the community. However, as the attack is still new, we observe from our miserable submission experience that there are general misunderstandings within the research community. We in this paper aim to clear some common concerns for the attack setting, and formally establish the research problem. Specifically, we first present the threat model of the problem, and introduce the harmful fine-tuning attack and its variants. Then we systematically survey the existing literature on attacks/defenses/mechanical analysis of the problem. Finally, we outline future research directions that might contribute to the development of the field. Additionally, we present a list of questions of interest, which might be useful to refer to when reviewers in the peer review process question the realism of the experiment/attack/defense setting. A curated list of relevant papers is maintained and made accessible at: https://github.com/git-disl/awesome_LLM-harmful-fine-tuning-papers.

A membership inference attack allows an adversary to query a trained machine learning model to predict whether or not a particular example was contained in the model's training dataset. These attacks are currently evaluated using average-case "accuracy" metrics that fail to characterize whether the attack can confidently identify any members of the training set. We argue that attacks should instead be evaluated by computing their true-positive rate at low (e.g., <0.1%) false-positive rates, and find most prior attacks perform poorly when evaluated in this way. To address this we develop a Likelihood Ratio Attack (LiRA) that carefully combines multiple ideas from the literature. Our attack is 10x more powerful at low false-positive rates, and also strictly dominates prior attacks on existing metrics.

Recent work has embodied LLMs as agents, allowing them to access tools, perform actions, and interact with external content (e.g., emails or websites). However, external content introduces the risk of indirect prompt injection (IPI) attacks, where malicious instructions are embedded within the content processed by LLMs, aiming to manipulate these agents into executing detrimental actions against users. Given the potentially severe consequences of such attacks, establishing benchmarks to assess and mitigate these risks is imperative. In this work, we introduce InjecAgent, a benchmark designed to assess the vulnerability of tool-integrated LLM agents to IPI attacks. InjecAgent comprises 1,054 test cases covering 17 different user tools and 62 attacker tools. We categorize attack intentions into two primary types: direct harm to users and exfiltration of private data. We evaluate 30 different LLM agents and show that agents are vulnerable to IPI attacks, with ReAct-prompted GPT-4 vulnerable to attacks 24% of the time. Further investigation into an enhanced setting, where the attacker instructions are reinforced with a hacking prompt, shows additional increases in success rates, nearly doubling the attack success rate on the ReAct-prompted GPT-4. Our findings raise questions about the widespread deployment of LLM Agents. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/uiuc-kang-lab/InjecAgent.

With the rapid development and integration of artificial intelligence (AI) methods in next-generation networks (NextG), AI algorithms have provided significant advantages for NextG in terms of frequency spectrum usage, bandwidth, latency, and security. A key feature of NextG is the integration of AI, i.e., self-learning architecture based on self-supervised algorithms, to improve the performance of the network. A secure AI-powered structure is also expected to protect NextG networks against cyber-attacks. However, AI itself may be attacked, i.e., model poisoning targeted by attackers, and it results in cybersecurity violations. This paper proposes an AI trust platform using Streamlit for NextG networks that allows researchers to evaluate, defend, certify, and verify their AI models and applications against adversarial threats of evasion, poisoning, extraction, and interference.

The living-off-the-land (LOTL) offensive methodologies rely on the perpetration of malicious actions through chains of commands executed by legitimate applications, identifiable exclusively by analysis of system logs. LOTL techniques are well hidden inside the stream of events generated by common legitimate activities, moreover threat actors often camouflage activity through obfuscation, making them particularly difficult to detect without incurring in plenty of false alarms, even using machine learning. To improve the performance of models in such an harsh environment, we propose an augmentation framework to enhance and diversify the presence of LOTL malicious activity inside legitimate logs. Guided by threat intelligence, we generate a dataset by injecting attack templates known to be employed in the wild, further enriched by malleable patterns of legitimate activities to replicate the behavior of evasive threat actors. We conduct an extensive ablation study to understand which models better handle our augmented dataset, also manipulated to mimic the presence of model-agnostic evasion and poisoning attacks. Our results suggest that augmentation is needed to maintain high-predictive capabilities, robustness to attack is achieved through specific hardening techniques like adversarial training, and it is possible to deploy near-real-time models with almost-zero false alarms.

To understand and identify the unprecedented risks posed by rapidly advancing artificial intelligence (AI) models, this report presents a comprehensive assessment of their frontier risks. Drawing on the E-T-C analysis (deployment environment, threat source, enabling capability) from the Frontier AI Risk Management Framework (v1.0) (SafeWork-F1-Framework), we identify critical risks in seven areas: cyber offense, biological and chemical risks, persuasion and manipulation, uncontrolled autonomous AI R\&D, strategic deception and scheming, self-replication, and collusion. Guided by the "AI-45^circ Law," we evaluate these risks using "red lines" (intolerable thresholds) and "yellow lines" (early warning indicators) to define risk zones: green (manageable risk for routine deployment and continuous monitoring), yellow (requiring strengthened mitigations and controlled deployment), and red (necessitating suspension of development and/or deployment). Experimental results show that all recent frontier AI models reside in green and yellow zones, without crossing red lines. Specifically, no evaluated models cross the yellow line for cyber offense or uncontrolled AI R\&D risks. For self-replication, and strategic deception and scheming, most models remain in the green zone, except for certain reasoning models in the yellow zone. In persuasion and manipulation, most models are in the yellow zone due to their effective influence on humans. For biological and chemical risks, we are unable to rule out the possibility of most models residing in the yellow zone, although detailed threat modeling and in-depth assessment are required to make further claims. This work reflects our current understanding of AI frontier risks and urges collective action to mitigate these challenges.

The research builds and evaluates the adversarial potential to introduce copied code or hallucinated AI recommendations for malicious code in popular code repositories. While foundational large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic guard against both harmful behaviors and toxic strings, previous work on math solutions that embed harmful prompts demonstrate that the guardrails may differ between expert contexts. These loopholes would appear in mixture of expert's models when the context of the question changes and may offer fewer malicious training examples to filter toxic comments or recommended offensive actions. The present work demonstrates that foundational models may refuse to propose destructive actions correctly when prompted overtly but may unfortunately drop their guard when presented with a sudden change of context, like solving a computer programming challenge. We show empirical examples with trojan-hosting repositories like GitHub, NPM, NuGet, and popular content delivery networks (CDN) like jsDelivr which amplify the attack surface. In the LLM's directives to be helpful, example recommendations propose application programming interface (API) endpoints which a determined domain-squatter could acquire and setup attack mobile infrastructure that triggers from the naively copied code. We compare this attack to previous work on context-shifting and contrast the attack surface as a novel version of "living off the land" attacks in the malware literature. In the latter case, foundational language models can hijack otherwise innocent user prompts to recommend actions that violate their owners' safety policies when posed directly without the accompanying coding support request.

Intelligent Personal Assistant (IA), also known as Voice Assistant (VA), has become increasingly popular as a human-computer interaction mechanism. Most smartphones have built-in voice assistants that are granted high privilege, which is able to access system resources and private information. Thus, once the voice assistants are exploited by attackers, they become the stepping stones for the attackers to hack into the smartphones. Prior work shows that the voice assistant can be activated by inter-component communication mechanism, through an official Android API. However, this attack method is only effective on Google Assistant, which is the official voice assistant developed by Google. Voice assistants in other operating systems, even custom Android systems, cannot be activated by this mechanism. Prior work also shows that the attacking voice commands can be inaudible, but it requires additional instruments to launch the attack, making it unrealistic for real-world attack. We propose an attacking framework, which records the activation voice of the user, and launch the attack by playing the activation voice and attack commands via the built-in speaker. An intelligent stealthy module is designed to decide on the suitable occasion to launch the attack, preventing the attack being noticed by the user. We demonstrate proof-of-concept attacks on Google Assistant, showing the feasibility and stealthiness of the proposed attack scheme. We suggest to revise the activation logic of voice assistant to be resilient to the speaker based attack.

Large language models (LLMs) are typically aligned to be harmless to humans. Unfortunately, recent work has shown that such models are susceptible to automated jailbreak attacks that induce them to generate harmful content. More recent LLMs often incorporate an additional layer of defense, a Guard Model, which is a second LLM that is designed to check and moderate the output response of the primary LLM. Our key contribution is to show a novel attack strategy, PRP, that is successful against several open-source (e.g., Llama 2) and closed-source (e.g., GPT 3.5) implementations of Guard Models. PRP leverages a two step prefix-based attack that operates by (a) constructing a universal adversarial prefix for the Guard Model, and (b) propagating this prefix to the response. We find that this procedure is effective across multiple threat models, including ones in which the adversary has no access to the Guard Model at all. Our work suggests that further advances are required on defenses and Guard Models before they can be considered effective.

Recent research has explored that LLM agents are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection (IPI) attacks, where malicious tasks embedded in tool-retrieved information can redirect the agent to take unauthorized actions. Existing defenses against IPI have significant limitations: either require essential model training resources, lack effectiveness against sophisticated attacks, or harm the normal utilities. We present MELON (Masked re-Execution and TooL comparisON), a novel IPI defense. Our approach builds on the observation that under a successful attack, the agent's next action becomes less dependent on user tasks and more on malicious tasks. Following this, we design MELON to detect attacks by re-executing the agent's trajectory with a masked user prompt modified through a masking function. We identify an attack if the actions generated in the original and masked executions are similar. We also include three key designs to reduce the potential false positives and false negatives. Extensive evaluation on the IPI benchmark AgentDojo demonstrates that MELON outperforms SOTA defenses in both attack prevention and utility preservation. Moreover, we show that combining MELON with a SOTA prompt augmentation defense (denoted as MELON-Aug) further improves its performance. We also conduct a detailed ablation study to validate our key designs. Code is available at https://github.com/kaijiezhu11/MELON.

Backdoor attacks have become a significant threat to the pre-training and deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs). Although numerous methods for detecting and mitigating backdoor attacks have been proposed, most rely on identifying and eliminating the ``shortcut" created by the backdoor, which links a specific source class to a target class. However, these approaches can be easily circumvented by designing multiple backdoor triggers that create shortcuts everywhere and therefore nowhere specific. In this study, we explore the concept of Multi-Trigger Backdoor Attacks (MTBAs), where multiple adversaries leverage different types of triggers to poison the same dataset. By proposing and investigating three types of multi-trigger attacks including parallel, sequential, and hybrid attacks, we demonstrate that 1) multiple triggers can coexist, overwrite, or cross-activate one another, and 2) MTBAs easily break the prevalent shortcut assumption underlying most existing backdoor detection/removal methods, rendering them ineffective. Given the security risk posed by MTBAs, we have created a multi-trigger backdoor poisoning dataset to facilitate future research on detecting and mitigating these attacks, and we also discuss potential defense strategies against MTBAs. Our code is available at https://github.com/bboylyg/Multi-Trigger-Backdoor-Attacks.

This paper addresses a critical challenge in cybersecurity: the gap between vulnerability information represented by Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) and the resulting cyberattack actions. CVEs provide insights into vulnerabilities, but often lack details on potential threat actions (tactics, techniques, and procedures, or TTPs) within the ATT&CK framework. This gap hinders accurate CVE categorization and proactive countermeasure initiation. The paper introduces the TTPpredictor tool, which uses innovative techniques to analyze CVE descriptions and infer plausible TTP attacks resulting from CVE exploitation. TTPpredictor overcomes challenges posed by limited labeled data and semantic disparities between CVE and TTP descriptions. It initially extracts threat actions from unstructured cyber threat reports using Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) techniques. These actions, along with their contextual attributes, are correlated with MITRE's attack functionality classes. This automated correlation facilitates the creation of labeled data, essential for categorizing novel threat actions into threat functionality classes and TTPs. The paper presents an empirical assessment, demonstrating TTPpredictor's effectiveness with accuracy rates of approximately 98% and F1-scores ranging from 95% to 98% in precise CVE classification to ATT&CK techniques. TTPpredictor outperforms state-of-the-art language model tools like ChatGPT. Overall, this paper offers a robust solution for linking CVEs to potential attack techniques, enhancing cybersecurity practitioners' ability to proactively identify and mitigate threats.

Data poisoning attacks manipulate training data to introduce unexpected behaviors into machine learning models at training time. For text-to-image generative models with massive training datasets, current understanding of poisoning attacks suggests that a successful attack would require injecting millions of poison samples into their training pipeline. In this paper, we show that poisoning attacks can be successful on generative models. We observe that training data per concept can be quite limited in these models, making them vulnerable to prompt-specific poisoning attacks, which target a model's ability to respond to individual prompts. We introduce Nightshade, an optimized prompt-specific poisoning attack where poison samples look visually identical to benign images with matching text prompts. Nightshade poison samples are also optimized for potency and can corrupt an Stable Diffusion SDXL prompt in <100 poison samples. Nightshade poison effects "bleed through" to related concepts, and multiple attacks can composed together in a single prompt. Surprisingly, we show that a moderate number of Nightshade attacks can destabilize general features in a text-to-image generative model, effectively disabling its ability to generate meaningful images. Finally, we propose the use of Nightshade and similar tools as a last defense for content creators against web scrapers that ignore opt-out/do-not-crawl directives, and discuss possible implications for model trainers and content creators.

Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) is being used to search for indicators of attacks that might have compromised an enterprise network for a long time without being discovered. To have a more effective analysis, CTI open standards have incorporated descriptive relationships showing how the indicators or observables are related to each other. However, these relationships are either completely overlooked in information gathering or not used for threat hunting. In this paper, we propose a system, called POIROT, which uses these correlations to uncover the steps of a successful attack campaign. We use kernel audits as a reliable source that covers all causal relations and information flows among system entities and model threat hunting as an inexact graph pattern matching problem. Our technical approach is based on a novel similarity metric which assesses an alignment between a query graph constructed out of CTI correlations and a provenance graph constructed out of kernel audit log records. We evaluate POIROT on publicly released real-world incident reports as well as reports of an adversarial engagement designed by DARPA, including ten distinct attack campaigns against different OS platforms such as Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows. Our evaluation results show that POIROT is capable of searching inside graphs containing millions of nodes and pinpoint the attacks in a few minutes, and the results serve to illustrate that CTI correlations could be used as robust and reliable artifacts for threat hunting.

This paper identifies and analyzes a novel vulnerability class in Model Context Protocol (MCP) based agent systems. The attack chain describes and demonstrates how benign, individually authorized tasks can be orchestrated to produce harmful emergent behaviors. Through systematic analysis using the MITRE ATLAS framework, we demonstrate how 95 agents tested with access to multiple services-including browser automation, financial analysis, location tracking, and code deployment-can chain legitimate operations into sophisticated attack sequences that extend beyond the security boundaries of any individual service. These red team exercises survey whether current MCP architectures lack cross-domain security measures necessary to detect or prevent a large category of compositional attacks. We present empirical evidence of specific attack chains that achieve targeted harm through service orchestration, including data exfiltration, financial manipulation, and infrastructure compromise. These findings reveal that the fundamental security assumption of service isolation fails when agents can coordinate actions across multiple domains, creating an exponential attack surface that grows with each additional capability. This research provides a barebones experimental framework that evaluate not whether agents can complete MCP benchmark tasks, but what happens when they complete them too well and optimize across multiple services in ways that violate human expectations and safety constraints. We propose three concrete experimental directions using the existing MCP benchmark suite.

Text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion have had a profound impact on daily life by enabling the generation of photorealistic images from textual prompts, fostering creativity, and enhancing visual experiences across various applications. However, these models also pose risks. Previous studies have successfully demonstrated that manipulated prompts can elicit text-to-image models to generate unsafe images, e.g., hateful meme variants. Yet, these studies only unleash the harmful power of text-to-image models in a passive manner. In this work, we focus on the proactive generation of unsafe images using targeted benign prompts via poisoning attacks. We propose two poisoning attacks: a basic attack and a utility-preserving attack. We qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate the proposed attacks using four representative hateful memes and multiple query prompts. Experimental results indicate that text-to-image models are vulnerable to the basic attack even with five poisoning samples. However, the poisoning effect can inadvertently spread to non-targeted prompts, leading to undesirable side effects. Root cause analysis identifies conceptual similarity as an important contributing factor to the side effects. To address this, we introduce the utility-preserving attack as a viable mitigation strategy to maintain the attack stealthiness, while ensuring decent attack performance. Our findings underscore the potential risks of adopting text-to-image models in real-world scenarios, calling for future research and safety measures in this space.

Motivated by ethical and legal concerns, the scientific community is actively developing methods to limit the misuse of Text-to-Image diffusion models for reproducing copyrighted, violent, explicit, or personal information in the generated images. Simultaneously, researchers put these newly developed safety measures to the test by assuming the role of an adversary to find vulnerabilities and backdoors in them. We use compositional property of diffusion models, which allows to leverage multiple prompts in a single image generation. This property allows us to combine other concepts, that should not have been affected by the inhibition, to reconstruct the vector, responsible for target concept generation, even though the direct computation of this vector is no longer accessible. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence why the proposed attacks are possible and discuss the implications of these findings for safe model deployment. We argue that it is essential to consider all possible approaches to image generation with diffusion models that can be employed by an adversary. Our work opens up the discussion about the implications of concept arithmetics and compositional inference for safety mechanisms in diffusion models. Content Advisory: This paper contains discussions and model-generated content that may be considered offensive. Reader discretion is advised. Project page: https://cs-people.bu.edu/vpetsiuk/arc

Machine learning and data mining algorithms play important roles in designing intrusion detection systems. Based on their approaches toward the detection of attacks in a network, intrusion detection systems can be broadly categorized into two types. In the misuse detection systems, an attack in a system is detected whenever the sequence of activities in the network matches with a known attack signature. In the anomaly detection approach, on the other hand, anomalous states in a system are identified based on a significant difference in the state transitions of the system from its normal states. This chapter presents a comprehensive discussion on some of the existing schemes of intrusion detection based on misuse detection, anomaly detection and hybrid detection approaches. Some future directions of research in the design of algorithms for intrusion detection are also identified.

Over the years, adversarial attempts against critical services have become more effective and sophisticated in launching low-profile attacks. This trend has always been concerning. However, an even more alarming trend is the increasing difficulty of collecting relevant evidence about these attacks and the involved threat actors in the early stages before significant damage is done. This issue puts defenders at a significant disadvantage, as it becomes exceedingly difficult to understand the attack details and formulate an appropriate response. Developing robust forensics tools to collect evidence about modern threats has never been easy. One main challenge is to provide a robust trade-off between achieving sufficient visibility while leaving minimal detectable artifacts. This paper will introduce LASE, an open-source Low-Artifact Forensics Engine to perform threat analysis and forensics in Windows operating system. LASE augments current analysis tools by providing detailed, system-wide monitoring capabilities while minimizing detectable artifacts. We designed multiple deployment scenarios, showing LASE's potential in evidence gathering and threat reasoning in a real-world setting. By making LASE and its execution trace data available to the broader research community, this work encourages further exploration in the field by reducing the engineering costs for threat analysis and building a longitudinal behavioral analysis catalog for diverse security domains.

We present the first systematic approach to static and dynamic taint analysis for Graph APIs focusing on broken access control. The approach comprises the following. We taint nodes in the Graph API if they represent data requiring specific privileges in order to be retrieved or manipulated, and identify API calls which are related to sources and sinks. Then, we statically analyze whether tainted information flow between API source and sink calls occurs. To this end, we model the API calls using graph transformation rules. We subsequently use critical pair analysis to automatically analyze potential dependencies between rules representing source calls and rules representing sink calls. We distinguish direct from indirect tainted information flow and argue under which conditions the CPA is able to detect not only direct, but also indirect tainted flow. The static taint analysis (i) identifies flows that need to be further reviewed, since tainted nodes may be created by an API call and used or manipulated by another API call later without having the necessary privileges, and (ii) can be used to systematically design dynamic security tests for broken access control. The dynamic taint analysis checks if potential broken access control risks detected during the static taint analysis really occur. We apply the approach to a part of the GitHub GraphQL API. The application illustrates that our analysis supports the detection of two types of broken access control systematically: the case where users of the API may not be able to access or manipulate information, although they should be able to do so; and the case where users (or attackers) of the API may be able to access/manipulate information that they should not.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to evolve, it is critical to assess the security threats and vulnerabilities that may arise both during their training phase and after models have been deployed. This survey seeks to define and categorize the various attacks targeting LLMs, distinguishing between those that occur during the training phase and those that affect already trained models. A thorough analysis of these attacks is presented, alongside an exploration of defense mechanisms designed to mitigate such threats. Defenses are classified into two primary categories: prevention-based and detection-based defenses. Furthermore, our survey summarizes possible attacks and their corresponding defense strategies. It also provides an evaluation of the effectiveness of the known defense mechanisms for the different security threats. Our survey aims to offer a structured framework for securing LLMs, while also identifying areas that require further research to improve and strengthen defenses against emerging security challenges.

Foundation models are increasingly becoming better autonomous programmers, raising the prospect that they could also automate dangerous offensive cyber-operations. Current frontier model audits probe the cybersecurity risks of such agents, but most fail to account for the degrees of freedom available to adversaries in the real world. In particular, with strong verifiers and financial incentives, agents for offensive cybersecurity are amenable to iterative improvement by would-be adversaries. We argue that assessments should take into account an expanded threat model in the context of cybersecurity, emphasizing the varying degrees of freedom that an adversary may possess in stateful and non-stateful environments within a fixed compute budget. We show that even with a relatively small compute budget (8 H100 GPU Hours in our study), adversaries can improve an agent's cybersecurity capability on InterCode CTF by more than 40\% relative to the baseline -- without any external assistance. These results highlight the need to evaluate agents' cybersecurity risk in a dynamic manner, painting a more representative picture of risk.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems will increasingly be used to cause harm as they grow more capable. In fact, AI systems are already starting to be used to automate fraudulent activities, violate human rights, create harmful fake images, and identify dangerous toxins. To prevent some misuses of AI, we argue that targeted interventions on certain capabilities will be warranted. These restrictions may include controlling who can access certain types of AI models, what they can be used for, whether outputs are filtered or can be traced back to their user, and the resources needed to develop them. We also contend that some restrictions on non-AI capabilities needed to cause harm will be required. Though capability restrictions risk reducing use more than misuse (facing an unfavorable Misuse-Use Tradeoff), we argue that interventions on capabilities are warranted when other interventions are insufficient, the potential harm from misuse is high, and there are targeted ways to intervene on capabilities. We provide a taxonomy of interventions that can reduce AI misuse, focusing on the specific steps required for a misuse to cause harm (the Misuse Chain), and a framework to determine if an intervention is warranted. We apply this reasoning to three examples: predicting novel toxins, creating harmful images, and automating spear phishing campaigns.

Collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (c-MARL) has rapidly evolved, offering state-of-the-art algorithms for real-world applications, including sensitive domains. However, a key challenge to its widespread adoption is the lack of a thorough investigation into its vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks. Existing work predominantly focuses on training-time attacks or unrealistic scenarios, such as access to policy weights or the ability to train surrogate policies. In this paper, we investigate new vulnerabilities under more realistic and constrained conditions, assuming an adversary can only collect and perturb the observations of deployed agents. We also consider scenarios where the adversary has no access at all. We propose simple yet highly effective algorithms for generating adversarial perturbations designed to misalign how victim agents perceive their environment. Our approach is empirically validated on three benchmarks and 22 environments, demonstrating its effectiveness across diverse algorithms and environments. Furthermore, we show that our algorithm is sample-efficient, requiring only 1,000 samples compared to the millions needed by previous methods.

Recently, autonomous agents built on large language models (LLMs) have experienced significant development and are being deployed in real-world applications. These agents can extend the base LLM's capabilities in multiple ways. For example, a well-built agent using GPT-3.5-Turbo as its core can outperform the more advanced GPT-4 model by leveraging external components. More importantly, the usage of tools enables these systems to perform actions in the real world, moving from merely generating text to actively interacting with their environment. Given the agents' practical applications and their ability to execute consequential actions, it is crucial to assess potential vulnerabilities. Such autonomous systems can cause more severe damage than a standalone language model if compromised. While some existing research has explored harmful actions by LLM agents, our study approaches the vulnerability from a different perspective. We introduce a new type of attack that causes malfunctions by misleading the agent into executing repetitive or irrelevant actions. We conduct comprehensive evaluations using various attack methods, surfaces, and properties to pinpoint areas of susceptibility. Our experiments reveal that these attacks can induce failure rates exceeding 80\% in multiple scenarios. Through attacks on implemented and deployable agents in multi-agent scenarios, we accentuate the realistic risks associated with these vulnerabilities. To mitigate such attacks, we propose self-examination detection methods. However, our findings indicate these attacks are difficult to detect effectively using LLMs alone, highlighting the substantial risks associated with this vulnerability.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely applied to different tasks such as bioinformatics, drug design, and social networks. However, recent studies have shown that GNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks which aim to mislead the node or subgraph classification prediction by adding subtle perturbations. Detecting these attacks is challenging due to the small magnitude of perturbation and the discrete nature of graph data. In this paper, we propose a general adversarial edge detection pipeline EDoG without requiring knowledge of the attack strategies based on graph generation. Specifically, we propose a novel graph generation approach combined with link prediction to detect suspicious adversarial edges. To effectively train the graph generative model, we sample several sub-graphs from the given graph data. We show that since the number of adversarial edges is usually low in practice, with low probability the sampled sub-graphs will contain adversarial edges based on the union bound. In addition, considering the strong attacks which perturb a large number of edges, we propose a set of novel features to perform outlier detection as the preprocessing for our detection. Extensive experimental results on three real-world graph datasets including a private transaction rule dataset from a major company and two types of synthetic graphs with controlled properties show that EDoG can achieve above 0.8 AUC against four state-of-the-art unseen attack strategies without requiring any knowledge about the attack type; and around 0.85 with knowledge of the attack type. EDoG significantly outperforms traditional malicious edge detection baselines. We also show that an adaptive attack with full knowledge of our detection pipeline is difficult to bypass it.

Despite recent rapid progress in AI safety, current large language models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks in multi-turn interaction settings, where attackers strategically adapt their prompts across conversation turns and pose a more critical yet realistic challenge. Existing approaches that discover safety vulnerabilities either rely on manual red-teaming with human experts or employ automated methods using pre-defined templates and human-curated attack data, with most focusing on single-turn attacks. However, these methods did not explore the vast space of possible multi-turn attacks, failing to consider novel attack trajectories that emerge from complex dialogue dynamics and strategic conversation planning. This gap is particularly critical given recent findings that LLMs exhibit significantly higher vulnerability to multi-turn attacks compared to single-turn attacks. We propose DialTree-RPO, an on-policy reinforcement learning framework integrated with tree search that autonomously discovers diverse multi-turn attack strategies by treating the dialogue as a sequential decision-making problem, enabling systematic exploration without manually curated data. Through extensive experiments, our approach not only achieves more than 25.9% higher ASR across 10 target models compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches, but also effectively uncovers new attack strategies by learning optimal dialogue policies that maximize attack success across multiple turns.

The rapid integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse sectors has marked a transformative era, showcasing remarkable capabilities in text generation and problem-solving tasks. However, this technological advancement is accompanied by significant risks and vulnerabilities. Despite ongoing security enhancements, attackers persistently exploit these weaknesses, casting doubts on the overall trustworthiness of LLMs. Compounding the issue, organisations are deploying LLM-integrated systems without understanding the severity of potential consequences. Existing studies by OWASP and MITRE offer a general overview of threats and vulnerabilities but lack a method for directly and succinctly analysing the risks for security practitioners, developers, and key decision-makers who are working with this novel technology. To address this gap, we propose a risk assessment process using tools like the OWASP risk rating methodology which is used for traditional systems. We conduct scenario analysis to identify potential threat agents and map the dependent system components against vulnerability factors. Through this analysis, we assess the likelihood of a cyberattack. Subsequently, we conduct a thorough impact analysis to derive a comprehensive threat matrix. We also map threats against three key stakeholder groups: developers engaged in model fine-tuning, application developers utilizing third-party APIs, and end users. The proposed threat matrix provides a holistic evaluation of LLM-related risks, enabling stakeholders to make informed decisions for effective mitigation strategies. Our outlined process serves as an actionable and comprehensive tool for security practitioners, offering insights for resource management and enhancing the overall system security.

AI agents have the potential to significantly alter the cybersecurity landscape. To help us understand this change, we introduce the first framework to capture offensive and defensive cyber-capabilities in evolving real-world systems. Instantiating this framework with BountyBench, we set up 25 systems with complex, real-world codebases. To capture the vulnerability lifecycle, we define three task types: Detect (detecting a new vulnerability), Exploit (exploiting a specific vulnerability), and Patch (patching a specific vulnerability). For Detect, we construct a new success indicator, which is general across vulnerability types and provides localized evaluation. We manually set up the environment for each system, including installing packages, setting up server(s), and hydrating database(s). We add 40 bug bounties, which are vulnerabilities with monetary awards from \10 to 30,485, and cover 9 of the OWASP Top 10 Risks. To modulate task difficulty, we devise a new strategy based on information to guide detection, interpolating from identifying a zero day to exploiting a specific vulnerability. We evaluate 5 agents: Claude Code, OpenAI Codex CLI, and custom agents with GPT-4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking. Given up to three attempts, the top-performing agents are Claude Code (5% on Detect, mapping to \1,350), Custom Agent with Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking (5% on Detect, mapping to 1,025; 67.5% on Exploit), and OpenAI Codex CLI (5% on Detect, mapping to \2,400; 90% on Patch, mapping to 14,422). OpenAI Codex CLI and Claude Code are more capable at defense, achieving higher Patch scores of 90% and 87.5%, compared to Exploit scores of 32.5% and 57.5% respectively; in contrast, the custom agents are relatively balanced between offense and defense, achieving Exploit scores of 40-67.5% and Patch scores of 45-60%.

The prospect of artificial intelligence (AI) competing in the adversarial landscape of cyber security has long been considered one of the most impactful, challenging, and potentially dangerous applications of AI. Here, we demonstrate a new approach to assessing AI's progress towards enabling and scaling real-world offensive cyber operations (OCO) tactics in use by modern threat actors. We detail OCCULT, a lightweight operational evaluation framework that allows cyber security experts to contribute to rigorous and repeatable measurement of the plausible cyber security risks associated with any given large language model (LLM) or AI employed for OCO. We also prototype and evaluate three very different OCO benchmarks for LLMs that demonstrate our approach and serve as examples for building benchmarks under the OCCULT framework. Finally, we provide preliminary evaluation results to demonstrate how this framework allows us to move beyond traditional all-or-nothing tests, such as those crafted from educational exercises like capture-the-flag environments, to contextualize our indicators and warnings in true cyber threat scenarios that present risks to modern infrastructure. We find that there has been significant recent advancement in the risks of AI being used to scale realistic cyber threats. For the first time, we find a model (DeepSeek-R1) is capable of correctly answering over 90% of challenging offensive cyber knowledge tests in our Threat Actor Competency Test for LLMs (TACTL) multiple-choice benchmarks. We also show how Meta's Llama and Mistral's Mixtral model families show marked performance improvements over earlier models against our benchmarks where LLMs act as offensive agents in MITRE's high-fidelity offensive and defensive cyber operations simulation environment, CyberLayer.

Large language models are aligned to be safe, preventing users from generating harmful content like misinformation or instructions for illegal activities. However, previous work has shown that the alignment process is vulnerable to poisoning attacks. Adversaries can manipulate the safety training data to inject backdoors that act like a universal sudo command: adding the backdoor string to any prompt enables harmful responses from models that, otherwise, behave safely. Our competition, co-located at IEEE SaTML 2024, challenged participants to find universal backdoors in several large language models. This report summarizes the key findings and promising ideas for future research.

The bulk of existing research in defending against adversarial examples focuses on defending against a single (typically bounded Lp-norm) attack, but for a practical setting, machine learning (ML) models should be robust to a wide variety of attacks. In this paper, we present the first unified framework for considering multiple attacks against ML models. Our framework is able to model different levels of learner's knowledge about the test-time adversary, allowing us to model robustness against unforeseen attacks and robustness against unions of attacks. Using our framework, we present the first leaderboard, MultiRobustBench, for benchmarking multiattack evaluation which captures performance across attack types and attack strengths. We evaluate the performance of 16 defended models for robustness against a set of 9 different attack types, including Lp-based threat models, spatial transformations, and color changes, at 20 different attack strengths (180 attacks total). Additionally, we analyze the state of current defenses against multiple attacks. Our analysis shows that while existing defenses have made progress in terms of average robustness across the set of attacks used, robustness against the worst-case attack is still a big open problem as all existing models perform worse than random guessing.

Prompt leakage poses a compelling security and privacy threat in LLM applications. Leakage of system prompts may compromise intellectual property, and act as adversarial reconnaissance for an attacker. A systematic evaluation of prompt leakage threats and mitigation strategies is lacking, especially for multi-turn LLM interactions. In this paper, we systematically investigate LLM vulnerabilities against prompt leakage for 10 closed- and open-source LLMs, across four domains. We design a unique threat model which leverages the LLM sycophancy effect and elevates the average attack success rate (ASR) from 17.7% to 86.2% in a multi-turn setting. Our standardized setup further allows dissecting leakage of specific prompt contents such as task instructions and knowledge documents. We measure the mitigation effect of 7 black-box defense strategies, along with finetuning an open-source model to defend against leakage attempts. We present different combination of defenses against our threat model, including a cost analysis. Our study highlights key takeaways for building secure LLM applications and provides directions for research in multi-turn LLM interactions

Recent research has highlighted the vulnerability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) against data poisoning attacks. These attacks aim to inject poisoning samples into the models' training dataset such that the trained models have inference failures. While previous studies have executed different types of attacks, one major challenge that greatly limits their effectiveness is the uncertainty of the re-training process after the injection of poisoning samples, including the re-training initialization or algorithms. To address this challenge, we propose a novel attack method called ''Sharpness-Aware Data Poisoning Attack (SAPA)''. In particular, it leverages the concept of DNNs' loss landscape sharpness to optimize the poisoning effect on the worst re-trained model. It helps enhance the preservation of the poisoning effect, regardless of the specific retraining procedure employed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAPA offers a general and principled strategy that significantly enhances various types of poisoning attacks.

Current LLM safety defenses fail under decomposition attacks, where a malicious goal is decomposed into benign subtasks that circumvent refusals. The challenge lies in the existing shallow safety alignment techniques: they only detect harm in the immediate prompt and do not reason about long-range intent, leaving them blind to malicious intent that emerges over a sequence of seemingly benign instructions. We therefore propose adding an external monitor that observes the conversation at a higher granularity. To facilitate our study of monitoring decomposition attacks, we curate the largest and most diverse dataset to date, including question-answering, text-to-image, and agentic tasks. We verify our datasets by testing them on frontier LLMs and show an 87% attack success rate on average on GPT-4o. This confirms that decomposition attack is broadly effective. Additionally, we find that random tasks can be injected into the decomposed subtasks to further obfuscate malicious intents. To defend in real time, we propose a lightweight sequential monitoring framework that cumulatively evaluates each subtask. We show that a carefully prompt engineered lightweight monitor achieves a 93% defense success rate, beating reasoning models like o3 mini as a monitor. Moreover, it remains robust against random task injection and cuts cost by 90% and latency by 50%. Our findings suggest that lightweight sequential monitors are highly effective in mitigating decomposition attacks and are viable in deployment.

The widespread deployment of LLM-based agents is likely to introduce a critical privacy threat: malicious agents that proactively engage others in multi-turn interactions to extract sensitive information. These dynamic dialogues enable adaptive attack strategies that can cause severe privacy violations, yet their evolving nature makes it difficult to anticipate and discover sophisticated vulnerabilities manually. To tackle this problem, we present a search-based framework that alternates between improving attacker and defender instructions by simulating privacy-critical agent interactions. Each simulation involves three roles: data subject, data sender, and data recipient. While the data subject's behavior is fixed, the attacker (data recipient) attempts to extract sensitive information from the defender (data sender) through persistent and interactive exchanges. To explore this interaction space efficiently, our search algorithm employs LLMs as optimizers, using parallel search with multiple threads and cross-thread propagation to analyze simulation trajectories and iteratively propose new instructions. Through this process, we find that attack strategies escalate from simple direct requests to sophisticated multi-turn tactics such as impersonation and consent forgery, while defenses advance from rule-based constraints to identity-verification state machines. The discovered attacks and defenses transfer across diverse scenarios and backbone models, demonstrating strong practical utility for building privacy-aware agents.

Question-and-answer agents like ChatGPT offer a novel tool for use as a potential honeypot interface in cyber security. By imitating Linux, Mac, and Windows terminal commands and providing an interface for TeamViewer, nmap, and ping, it is possible to create a dynamic environment that can adapt to the actions of attackers and provide insight into their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). The paper illustrates ten diverse tasks that a conversational agent or large language model might answer appropriately to the effects of command-line attacker. The original result features feasibility studies for ten model tasks meant for defensive teams to mimic expected honeypot interfaces with minimal risks. Ultimately, the usefulness outside of forensic activities stems from whether the dynamic honeypot can extend the time-to-conquer or otherwise delay attacker timelines short of reaching key network assets like databases or confidential information. While ongoing maintenance and monitoring may be required, ChatGPT's ability to detect and deflect malicious activity makes it a valuable option for organizations seeking to enhance their cyber security posture. Future work will focus on cybersecurity layers, including perimeter security, host virus detection, and data security.

A high volume of recent ML security literature focuses on attacks against aligned large language models (LLMs). These attacks may extract private information or coerce the model into producing harmful outputs. In real-world deployments, LLMs are often part of a larger agentic pipeline including memory systems, retrieval, web access, and API calling. Such additional components introduce vulnerabilities that make these LLM-powered agents much easier to attack than isolated LLMs, yet relatively little work focuses on the security of LLM agents. In this paper, we analyze security and privacy vulnerabilities that are unique to LLM agents. We first provide a taxonomy of attacks categorized by threat actors, objectives, entry points, attacker observability, attack strategies, and inherent vulnerabilities of agent pipelines. We then conduct a series of illustrative attacks on popular open-source and commercial agents, demonstrating the immediate practical implications of their vulnerabilities. Notably, our attacks are trivial to implement and require no understanding of machine learning.

The rapid advancement of large models, driven by their exceptional abilities in learning and generalization through large-scale pre-training, has reshaped the landscape of Artificial Intelligence (AI). These models are now foundational to a wide range of applications, including conversational AI, recommendation systems, autonomous driving, content generation, medical diagnostics, and scientific discovery. However, their widespread deployment also exposes them to significant safety risks, raising concerns about robustness, reliability, and ethical implications. This survey provides a systematic review of current safety research on large models, covering Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models, Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Diffusion Models (DMs), and large-model-based Agents. Our contributions are summarized as follows: (1) We present a comprehensive taxonomy of safety threats to these models, including adversarial attacks, data poisoning, backdoor attacks, jailbreak and prompt injection attacks, energy-latency attacks, data and model extraction attacks, and emerging agent-specific threats. (2) We review defense strategies proposed for each type of attacks if available and summarize the commonly used datasets and benchmarks for safety research. (3) Building on this, we identify and discuss the open challenges in large model safety, emphasizing the need for comprehensive safety evaluations, scalable and effective defense mechanisms, and sustainable data practices. More importantly, we highlight the necessity of collective efforts from the research community and international collaboration. Our work can serve as a useful reference for researchers and practitioners, fostering the ongoing development of comprehensive defense systems and platforms to safeguard AI models.

Large language models (LLMs) typically deploy safety mechanisms to prevent harmful content generation. Most current approaches focus narrowly on risks posed by malicious actors, often framing risks as adversarial events and relying on defensive refusals. However, in real-world settings, risks also come from non-malicious users seeking help while under psychological distress (e.g., self-harm intentions). In such cases, the model's response can strongly influence the user's next actions. Simple refusals may lead them to repeat, escalate, or move to unsafe platforms, creating worse outcomes. We introduce Constructive Safety Alignment (CSA), a human-centric paradigm that protects against malicious misuse while actively guiding vulnerable users toward safe and helpful results. Implemented in Oyster-I (Oy1), CSA combines game-theoretic anticipation of user reactions, fine-grained risk boundary discovery, and interpretable reasoning control, turning safety into a trust-building process. Oy1 achieves state-of-the-art safety among open models while retaining high general capabilities. On our Constructive Benchmark, it shows strong constructive engagement, close to GPT-5, and unmatched robustness on the Strata-Sword jailbreak dataset, nearing GPT-o1 levels. By shifting from refusal-first to guidance-first safety, CSA redefines the model-user relationship, aiming for systems that are not just safe, but meaningfully helpful. We release Oy1, code, and the benchmark to support responsible, user-centered AI.

The strong planning and reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have fostered the development of agent-based systems capable of leveraging external tools and interacting with increasingly complex environments. However, these powerful features also introduce a critical security risk: indirect prompt injection, a sophisticated attack vector that compromises the core of these agents, the LLM, by manipulating contextual information rather than direct user prompts. In this work, we propose a generic black-box fuzzing framework, AgentVigil, designed to automatically discover and exploit indirect prompt injection vulnerabilities across diverse LLM agents. Our approach starts by constructing a high-quality initial seed corpus, then employs a seed selection algorithm based on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to iteratively refine inputs, thereby maximizing the likelihood of uncovering agent weaknesses. We evaluate AgentVigil on two public benchmarks, AgentDojo and VWA-adv, where it achieves 71% and 70% success rates against agents based on o3-mini and GPT-4o, respectively, nearly doubling the performance of baseline attacks. Moreover, AgentVigil exhibits strong transferability across unseen tasks and internal LLMs, as well as promising results against defenses. Beyond benchmark evaluations, we apply our attacks in real-world environments, successfully misleading agents to navigate to arbitrary URLs, including malicious sites.

As smart grids (SG) increasingly rely on advanced technologies like sensors and communication systems for efficient energy generation, distribution, and consumption, they become enticing targets for sophisticated cyberattacks. These evolving threats demand robust security measures to maintain the stability and resilience of modern energy systems. While extensive research has been conducted, a comprehensive exploration of proactive cyber defense strategies utilizing Deep Learning (DL) in {SG} remains scarce in the literature. This survey bridges this gap, studying the latest DL techniques for proactive cyber defense. The survey begins with an overview of related works and our distinct contributions, followed by an examination of SG infrastructure. Next, we classify various cyber defense techniques into reactive and proactive categories. A significant focus is placed on DL-enabled proactive defenses, where we provide a comprehensive taxonomy of DL approaches, highlighting their roles and relevance in the proactive security of SG. Subsequently, we analyze the most significant DL-based methods currently in use. Further, we explore Moving Target Defense, a proactive defense strategy, and its interactions with DL methodologies. We then provide an overview of benchmark datasets used in this domain to substantiate the discourse.{ This is followed by a critical discussion on their practical implications and broader impact on cybersecurity in Smart Grids.} The survey finally lists the challenges associated with deploying DL-based security systems within SG, followed by an outlook on future developments in this key field.

This paper tackles optimization problems whose objective and constraints involve a trained Neural Network (NN), where the goal is to maximize f(Phi(x)) subject to c(Phi(x)) leq 0, with f smooth, c general and non-stringent, and Phi an already trained and possibly nonwhite-box NN. We address two challenges regarding this problem: identifying ascent directions for local search, and ensuring reliable convergence towards relevant local solutions. To this end, we re-purpose the notion of directional NN attacks as efficient optimization subroutines, since directional NN attacks use the neural structure of Phi to compute perturbations of x that steer Phi(x) in prescribed directions. Precisely, we develop an attack operator that computes attacks of Phi at any x along the direction nabla f(Phi(x)). Then, we propose a hybrid algorithm combining the attack operator with derivative-free optimization (DFO) techniques, designed for numerical reliability by remaining oblivious to the structure of the problem. We consider the cDSM algorithm, which offers asymptotic guarantees to converge to a local solution under mild assumptions on the problem. The resulting method alternates between attack-based steps for heuristic yet fast local intensification and cDSM steps for certified convergence and numerical reliability. Experiments on three problems show that this hybrid approach consistently outperforms standard DFO baselines.

Despite careful safety alignment, current large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to various attacks. To further unveil the safety risks of LLMs, we introduce a Safety Concept Activation Vector (SCAV) framework, which effectively guides the attacks by accurately interpreting LLMs' safety mechanisms. We then develop an SCAV-guided attack method that can generate both attack prompts and embedding-level attacks with automatically selected perturbation hyperparameters. Both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that our attack method significantly improves the attack success rate and response quality while requiring less training data. Additionally, we find that our generated attack prompts may be transferable to GPT-4, and the embedding-level attacks may also be transferred to other white-box LLMs whose parameters are known. Our experiments further uncover the safety risks present in current LLMs. For example, in our evaluation of seven open-source LLMs, we observe an average attack success rate of 99.14%, based on the classic keyword-matching criterion. Finally, we provide insights into the safety mechanism of LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/SproutNan/AI-Safety_SCAV.

The safety of large language models (LLMs) has garnered significant research attention. In this paper, we argue that previous empirical studies demonstrate LLMs exhibit a propensity to trust information from authoritative sources, such as academic papers, implying new possible vulnerabilities. To verify this possibility, a preliminary analysis is designed to illustrate our two findings. Based on this insight, a novel jailbreaking method, Paper Summary Attack (PSA), is proposed. It systematically synthesizes content from either attack-focused or defense-focused LLM safety paper to construct an adversarial prompt template, while strategically infilling harmful query as adversarial payloads within predefined subsections. Extensive experiments show significant vulnerabilities not only in base LLMs, but also in state-of-the-art reasoning model like Deepseek-R1. PSA achieves a 97\% attack success rate (ASR) on well-aligned models like Claude3.5-Sonnet and an even higher 98\% ASR on Deepseek-R1. More intriguingly, our work has further revealed diametrically opposed vulnerability bias across different base models, and even between different versions of the same model, when exposed to either attack-focused or defense-focused papers. This phenomenon potentially indicates future research clues for both adversarial methodologies and safety alignment.Code is available at https://github.com/233liang/Paper-Summary-Attack

With the increase of data in day-to-day life, businesses and different stakeholders need to analyze the data for better predictions. Traditionally, relational data has been a source of various insights, but with the increase in computational power and the need to understand deeper relationships between entities, the need to design new techniques has arisen. For this graph data analysis has become an extraordinary tool for understanding the data, which reveals more realistic and flexible modelling of complex relationships. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great promise in various applications, such as social network analysis, recommendation systems, drug discovery, and more. However, many adversarial attacks can happen over the data, whether during training (poisoning attack) or during testing (evasion attack), which can adversely manipulate the desired outcome from the GNN model. Therefore, it is crucial to make the GNNs robust to such attacks. The existing robustness methods are computationally demanding and perform poorly when the intensity of attack increases. This paper presents a computationally efficient framework, namely, pLapGNN, based on weighted p-Laplacian for making GNNs robust. Empirical evaluation on real datasets establishes the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed method.

Recent studies have demonstrated that deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks during the training process. Specifically, the adversaries intend to embed hidden backdoors in DNNs so that malicious model predictions can be activated through pre-defined trigger patterns. In this paper, we explore the backdoor mechanism from the angle of the model structure. We select the skip connection for discussions, inspired by the understanding that it helps the learning of model `shortcuts' where backdoor triggers are usually easier to be learned. Specifically, we demonstrate that the attack success rate (ASR) decreases significantly when reducing the outputs of some key skip connections. Based on this observation, we design a simple yet effective backdoor removal method by suppressing the skip connections in critical layers selected by our method. We also implement fine-tuning on these layers to recover high benign accuracy and to further reduce ASR. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our method.

Recently, test-time adaptation (TTA) has been proposed as a promising solution for addressing distribution shifts. It allows a base model to adapt to an unforeseen distribution during inference by leveraging the information from the batch of (unlabeled) test data. However, we uncover a novel security vulnerability of TTA based on the insight that predictions on benign samples can be impacted by malicious samples in the same batch. To exploit this vulnerability, we propose Distribution Invading Attack (DIA), which injects a small fraction of malicious data into the test batch. DIA causes models using TTA to misclassify benign and unperturbed test data, providing an entirely new capability for adversaries that is infeasible in canonical machine learning pipelines. Through comprehensive evaluations, we demonstrate the high effectiveness of our attack on multiple benchmarks across six TTA methods. In response, we investigate two countermeasures to robustify the existing insecure TTA implementations, following the principle of "security by design". Together, we hope our findings can make the community aware of the utility-security tradeoffs in deploying TTA and provide valuable insights for developing robust TTA approaches.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. The backdoor adversaries intend to maliciously control the predictions of attacked DNNs by injecting hidden backdoors that can be activated by adversary-specified trigger patterns during the training process. One recent research revealed that most of the existing attacks failed in the real physical world since the trigger contained in the digitized test samples may be different from that of the one used for training. Accordingly, users can adopt spatial transformations as the image pre-processing to deactivate hidden backdoors. In this paper, we explore the previous findings from another side. We exploit classical spatial transformations (i.e. rotation and translation) with the specific parameter as trigger patterns to design a simple yet effective poisoning-based backdoor attack. For example, only images rotated to a particular angle can activate the embedded backdoor of attacked DNNs. Extensive experiments are conducted, verifying the effectiveness of our attack under both digital and physical settings and its resistance to existing backdoor defenses.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in various applications. As their usage grows, concerns regarding their safety are rising, especially in maintaining harmless responses when faced with malicious instructions. Many defense strategies have been developed to enhance the safety of LLMs. However, our research finds that existing defense strategies lead LLMs to predominantly adopt a rejection-oriented stance, thereby diminishing the usability of their responses to benign instructions. To solve this problem, we introduce the MoGU framework, designed to enhance LLMs' safety while preserving their usability. Our MoGU framework transforms the base LLM into two variants: the usable LLM and the safe LLM, and further employs dynamic routing to balance their contribution. When encountering malicious instructions, the router will assign a higher weight to the safe LLM to ensure that responses are harmless. Conversely, for benign instructions, the router prioritizes the usable LLM, facilitating usable and helpful responses. On various open-sourced LLMs, we compare multiple defense strategies to verify the superiority of our MoGU framework. Besides, our analysis provides key insights into the effectiveness of MoGU and verifies that our designed routing mechanism can effectively balance the contribution of each variant by assigning weights. Our work released the safer Llama2, Vicuna, Falcon, Dolphin, and Baichuan2.

How should we evaluate the robustness of language model defenses? Current defenses against jailbreaks and prompt injections (which aim to prevent an attacker from eliciting harmful knowledge or remotely triggering malicious actions, respectively) are typically evaluated either against a static set of harmful attack strings, or against computationally weak optimization methods that were not designed with the defense in mind. We argue that this evaluation process is flawed. Instead, we should evaluate defenses against adaptive attackers who explicitly modify their attack strategy to counter a defense's design while spending considerable resources to optimize their objective. By systematically tuning and scaling general optimization techniques-gradient descent, reinforcement learning, random search, and human-guided exploration-we bypass 12 recent defenses (based on a diverse set of techniques) with attack success rate above 90% for most; importantly, the majority of defenses originally reported near-zero attack success rates. We believe that future defense work must consider stronger attacks, such as the ones we describe, in order to make reliable and convincing claims of robustness.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked widespread concerns about their safety. Recent work demonstrates that safety alignment of LLMs can be easily removed by fine-tuning with a few adversarially chosen instruction-following examples, i.e., fine-tuning attacks. We take a further step to understand fine-tuning attacks in multilingual LLMs. We first discover cross-lingual generalization of fine-tuning attacks: using a few adversarially chosen instruction-following examples in one language, multilingual LLMs can also be easily compromised (e.g., multilingual LLMs fail to refuse harmful prompts in other languages). Motivated by this finding, we hypothesize that safety-related information is language-agnostic and propose a new method termed Safety Information Localization (SIL) to identify the safety-related information in the model parameter space. Through SIL, we validate this hypothesis and find that only changing 20% of weight parameters in fine-tuning attacks can break safety alignment across all languages. Furthermore, we provide evidence to the alternative pathways hypothesis for why freezing safety-related parameters does not prevent fine-tuning attacks, and we demonstrate that our attack vector can still jailbreak LLMs adapted to new languages.

Engaging in the deliberate generation of abnormal outputs from Large Language Models (LLMs) by attacking them is a novel human activity. This paper presents a thorough exposition of how and why people perform such attacks, defining LLM red-teaming based on extensive and diverse evidence. Using a formal qualitative methodology, we interviewed dozens of practitioners from a broad range of backgrounds, all contributors to this novel work of attempting to cause LLMs to fail. We focused on the research questions of defining LLM red teaming, uncovering the motivations and goals for performing the activity, and characterizing the strategies people use when attacking LLMs. Based on the data, LLM red teaming is defined as a limit-seeking, non-malicious, manual activity, which depends highly on a team-effort and an alchemist mindset. It is highly intrinsically motivated by curiosity, fun, and to some degrees by concerns for various harms of deploying LLMs. We identify a taxonomy of 12 strategies and 35 different techniques of attacking LLMs. These findings are presented as a comprehensive grounded theory of how and why people attack large language models: LLM red teaming.

Recent research shows that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to harmful fine-tuning attacks -- models lose their safety alignment ability after fine-tuning on a few harmful samples. For risk mitigation, a guardrail is typically used to filter out harmful samples before fine-tuning. By designing a new red-teaming method, we in this paper show that purely relying on the moderation guardrail for data filtration is not reliable. Our proposed attack method, dubbed Virus, easily bypasses the guardrail moderation by slightly modifying the harmful data. Experimental results show that the harmful data optimized by Virus is not detectable by the guardrail with up to 100\% leakage ratio, and can simultaneously achieve superior attack performance. Finally, the key message we want to convey through this paper is that: it is reckless to consider guardrail moderation as a clutch at straws towards harmful fine-tuning attack, as it cannot solve the inherent safety issue of the pre-trained LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/git-disl/Virus

We study deceptive fairness attacks on graphs to answer the following question: How can we achieve poisoning attacks on a graph learning model to exacerbate the bias deceptively? We answer this question via a bi-level optimization problem and propose a meta learning-based framework named FATE. FATE is broadly applicable with respect to various fairness definitions and graph learning models, as well as arbitrary choices of manipulation operations. We further instantiate FATE to attack statistical parity and individual fairness on graph neural networks. We conduct extensive experimental evaluations on real-world datasets in the task of semi-supervised node classification. The experimental results demonstrate that FATE could amplify the bias of graph neural networks with or without fairness consideration while maintaining the utility on the downstream task. We hope this paper provides insights into the adversarial robustness of fair graph learning and can shed light on designing robust and fair graph learning in future studies.

AI control protocols serve as a defense mechanism to stop untrusted LLM agents from causing harm in autonomous settings. Prior work treats this as a security problem, stress testing with exploits that use the deployment context to subtly complete harmful side tasks, such as backdoor insertion. In practice, most AI control protocols are fundamentally based on LLM monitors, which can become a central point of failure. We study adaptive attacks by an untrusted model that knows the protocol and the monitor model, which is plausible if the untrusted model was trained with a later knowledge cutoff or can search for this information autonomously. We instantiate a simple adaptive attack vector by which the attacker embeds publicly known or zero-shot prompt injections in the model outputs. Using this tactic, frontier models consistently evade diverse monitors and complete malicious tasks on two main AI control benchmarks. The attack works universally against current protocols that rely on a monitor. Furthermore, the recent Defer-to-Resample protocol even backfires, as its resampling amplifies the prompt injection and effectively reframes it as a best-of-n attack. In general, adaptive attacks on monitor models represent a major blind spot in current control protocols and should become a standard component of evaluations for future AI control mechanisms.

The adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) in various applications inevitably comes with expanding the attack surface, combining new security threats along with the traditional ones. Consequently, numerous research and industrial initiatives aim to mitigate these security threats in GenAI by developing metrics and designing defenses. However, while most of the GenAI security work focuses on universal threats (e.g. manipulating the LLM to generate forbidden content), there is significantly less discussion on application-level security and how to mitigate it. Thus, in this work we adopt an application-centric approach to GenAI security, and show that while LLMs cannot protect against ad-hoc application specific threats, they can provide the framework for applications to protect themselves against such threats. Our first contribution is defining Security Steerability - a novel security measure for LLMs, assessing the model's capability to adhere to strict guardrails that are defined in the system prompt ('Refrain from discussing about politics'). These guardrails, in case effective, can stop threats in the presence of malicious users who attempt to circumvent the application and cause harm to its providers. Our second contribution is a methodology to measure the security steerability of LLMs, utilizing two newly-developed datasets: VeganRibs assesses the LLM behavior in forcing specific guardrails that are not security per se in the presence of malicious user that uses attack boosters (jailbreaks and perturbations), and ReverseText takes this approach further and measures the LLM ability to force specific treatment of the user input as plain text while do user try to give it additional meanings...

The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened up new opportunities across various domains and applications; yet it also presents challenges related to potential misuse. To mitigate such risks, red teaming has been employed as a proactive security measure to probe language models for harmful outputs via jailbreak attacks. However, current jailbreak attack approaches are single-turn with explicit malicious queries that do not fully capture the complexity of real-world interactions. In reality, users can engage in multi-turn interactions with LLM-based chat assistants, allowing them to conceal their true intentions in a more covert manner. To bridge this gap, we, first, propose a new jailbreak approach, RED QUEEN ATTACK. This method constructs a multi-turn scenario, concealing the malicious intent under the guise of preventing harm. We craft 40 scenarios that vary in turns and select 14 harmful categories to generate 56k multi-turn attack data points. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the RED QUEEN ATTACK with four representative LLM families of different sizes. Our experiments reveal that all LLMs are vulnerable to RED QUEEN ATTACK, reaching 87.62% attack success rate on GPT-4o and 75.4% on Llama3-70B. Further analysis reveals that larger models are more susceptible to the RED QUEEN ATTACK, with multi-turn structures and concealment strategies contributing to its success. To prioritize safety, we introduce a straightforward mitigation strategy called RED QUEEN GUARD, which aligns LLMs to effectively counter adversarial attacks. This approach reduces the attack success rate to below 1% while maintaining the model's performance across standard benchmarks. Full implementation and dataset are publicly accessible at https://github.com/kriti-hippo/red_queen.

Recent advancements in Web AI agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in addressing complex web navigation tasks. However, emerging research shows that these agents exhibit greater vulnerability compared to standalone Large Language Models (LLMs), despite both being built upon the same safety-aligned models. This discrepancy is particularly concerning given the greater flexibility of Web AI Agent compared to standalone LLMs, which may expose them to a wider range of adversarial user inputs. To build a scaffold that addresses these concerns, this study investigates the underlying factors that contribute to the increased vulnerability of Web AI agents. Notably, this disparity stems from the multifaceted differences between Web AI agents and standalone LLMs, as well as the complex signals - nuances that simple evaluation metrics, such as success rate, often fail to capture. To tackle these challenges, we propose a component-level analysis and a more granular, systematic evaluation framework. Through this fine-grained investigation, we identify three critical factors that amplify the vulnerability of Web AI agents; (1) embedding user goals into the system prompt, (2) multi-step action generation, and (3) observational capabilities. Our findings highlights the pressing need to enhance security and robustness in AI agent design and provide actionable insights for targeted defense strategies.

The growing dependence on machine learning in real-world applications emphasizes the importance of understanding and ensuring its safety. Backdoor attacks pose a significant security risk due to their stealthy nature and potentially serious consequences. Such attacks involve embedding triggers within a learning model with the intention of causing malicious behavior when an active trigger is present while maintaining regular functionality without it. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of any backdoor attack incorporating a constant trigger, by establishing tight lower and upper boundaries for the performance of the compromised model on both clean and backdoor test data. The developed theory answers a series of fundamental but previously underexplored problems, including (1) what are the determining factors for a backdoor attack's success, (2) what is the direction of the most effective backdoor attack, and (3) when will a human-imperceptible trigger succeed. Our derived understanding applies to both discriminative and generative models. We also demonstrate the theory by conducting experiments using benchmark datasets and state-of-the-art backdoor attack scenarios.

Today's LLMs are susceptible to prompt injections, jailbreaks, and other attacks that allow adversaries to overwrite a model's original instructions with their own malicious prompts. In this work, we argue that one of the primary vulnerabilities underlying these attacks is that LLMs often consider system prompts (e.g., text from an application developer) to be the same priority as text from untrusted users and third parties. To address this, we propose an instruction hierarchy that explicitly defines how models should behave when instructions of different priorities conflict. We then propose a data generation method to demonstrate this hierarchical instruction following behavior, which teaches LLMs to selectively ignore lower-privileged instructions. We apply this method to GPT-3.5, showing that it drastically increases robustness -- even for attack types not seen during training -- while imposing minimal degradations on standard capabilities.

Distribution inference, sometimes called property inference, infers statistical properties about a training set from access to a model trained on that data. Distribution inference attacks can pose serious risks when models are trained on private data, but are difficult to distinguish from the intrinsic purpose of statistical machine learning -- namely, to produce models that capture statistical properties about a distribution. Motivated by Yeom et al.'s membership inference framework, we propose a formal definition of distribution inference attacks that is general enough to describe a broad class of attacks distinguishing between possible training distributions. We show how our definition captures previous ratio-based property inference attacks as well as new kinds of attack including revealing the average node degree or clustering coefficient of a training graph. To understand distribution inference risks, we introduce a metric that quantifies observed leakage by relating it to the leakage that would occur if samples from the training distribution were provided directly to the adversary. We report on a series of experiments across a range of different distributions using both novel black-box attacks and improved versions of the state-of-the-art white-box attacks. Our results show that inexpensive attacks are often as effective as expensive meta-classifier attacks, and that there are surprising asymmetries in the effectiveness of attacks. Code is available at https://github.com/iamgroot42/FormEstDistRisks

Multi-modal foundation models combining vision and language models such as Flamingo or GPT-4 have recently gained enormous interest. Alignment of foundation models is used to prevent models from providing toxic or harmful output. While malicious users have successfully tried to jailbreak foundation models, an equally important question is if honest users could be harmed by malicious third-party content. In this paper we show that imperceivable attacks on images in order to change the caption output of a multi-modal foundation model can be used by malicious content providers to harm honest users e.g. by guiding them to malicious websites or broadcast fake information. This indicates that countermeasures to adversarial attacks should be used by any deployed multi-modal foundation model.

As frontier AI advances rapidly, understanding its impact on cybersecurity and inherent risks is essential to ensuring safe AI evolution (e.g., guiding risk mitigation and informing policymakers). While some studies review AI applications in cybersecurity, none of them comprehensively discuss AI's future impacts or provide concrete recommendations for navigating its safe and secure usage. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of frontier AI's impact on cybersecurity and establishes a systematic framework for risk assessment and mitigation. To this end, we first define and categorize the marginal risks of frontier AI in cybersecurity and then systemically analyze the current and future impacts of frontier AI in cybersecurity, qualitatively and quantitatively. We also discuss why frontier AI likely benefits attackers more than defenders in the short term from equivalence classes, asymmetry, and economic impact. Next, we explore frontier AI's impact on future software system development, including enabling complex hybrid systems while introducing new risks. Based on our findings, we provide security recommendations, including constructing fine-grained benchmarks for risk assessment, designing AI agents for defenses, building security mechanisms and provable defenses for hybrid systems, enhancing pre-deployment security testing and transparency, and strengthening defenses for users. Finally, we present long-term research questions essential for understanding AI's future impacts and unleashing its defensive capabilities.

Federated learning is used to train a shared model in a decentralized way without clients sharing private data with each other. Federated learning systems are susceptible to poisoning attacks when malicious clients send false updates to the central server. Existing defense strategies are ineffective under non-IID data settings. This paper proposes a new defense strategy, FedCPA (Federated learning with Critical Parameter Analysis). Our attack-tolerant aggregation method is based on the observation that benign local models have similar sets of top-k and bottom-k critical parameters, whereas poisoned local models do not. Experiments with different attack scenarios on multiple datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms existing defense strategies in defending against poisoning attacks.

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.

As generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), become increasingly integrated into production applications, new attack surfaces and vulnerabilities emerge and put a focus on adversarial threats in natural language and multi-modal systems. Red-teaming has gained importance in proactively identifying weaknesses in these systems, while blue-teaming works to protect against such adversarial attacks. Despite growing academic interest in adversarial risks for generative AI, there is limited guidance tailored for practitioners to assess and mitigate these challenges in real-world environments. To address this, our contributions include: (1) a practical examination of red- and blue-teaming strategies for securing generative AI, (2) identification of key challenges and open questions in defense development and evaluation, and (3) the Attack Atlas, an intuitive framework that brings a practical approach to analyzing single-turn input attacks, placing it at the forefront for practitioners. This work aims to bridge the gap between academic insights and practical security measures for the protection of generative AI systems.

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we take the role of investigators who want to trace the attack and identify the source, that is, the particular model which the adversarial examples are generated from. Techniques derived would aid forensic investigation of attack incidents and serve as deterrence to potential attacks. We consider the buyers-seller setting where a machine learning model is to be distributed to various buyers and each buyer receives a slightly different copy with same functionality. A malicious buyer generates adversarial examples from a particular copy M_i and uses them to attack other copies. From these adversarial examples, the investigator wants to identify the source M_i. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage separate-and-trace framework. The model separation stage generates multiple copies of a model for a same classification task. This process injects unique characteristics into each copy so that adversarial examples generated have distinct and traceable features. We give a parallel structure which embeds a ``tracer'' in each copy, and a noise-sensitive training loss to achieve this goal. The tracing stage takes in adversarial examples and a few candidate models, and identifies the likely source. Based on the unique features induced by the noise-sensitive loss function, we could effectively trace the potential adversarial copy by considering the output logits from each tracer. Empirical results show that it is possible to trace the origin of the adversarial example and the mechanism can be applied to a wide range of architectures and datasets.

To achieve reliable, robust, and safe AI systems, it is vital to implement fallback strategies when AI predictions cannot be trusted. Certifiers for neural networks are a reliable way to check the robustness of these predictions. They guarantee for some predictions that a certain class of manipulations or attacks could not have changed the outcome. For the remaining predictions without guarantees, the method abstains from making a prediction, and a fallback strategy needs to be invoked, which typically incurs additional costs, can require a human operator, or even fail to provide any prediction. While this is a key concept towards safe and secure AI, we show for the first time that this approach comes with its own security risks, as such fallback strategies can be deliberately triggered by an adversary. In addition to naturally occurring abstains for some inputs and perturbations, the adversary can use training-time attacks to deliberately trigger the fallback with high probability. This transfers the main system load onto the fallback, reducing the overall system's integrity and/or availability. We design two novel availability attacks, which show the practical relevance of these threats. For example, adding 1% poisoned data during training is sufficient to trigger the fallback and hence make the model unavailable for up to 100% of all inputs by inserting the trigger. Our extensive experiments across multiple datasets, model architectures, and certifiers demonstrate the broad applicability of these attacks. An initial investigation into potential defenses shows that current approaches are insufficient to mitigate the issue, highlighting the need for new, specific solutions.

LLM-based agents are becoming increasingly proficient at solving web-based tasks. With this capability comes a greater risk of misuse for malicious purposes, such as posting misinformation in an online forum or selling illicit substances on a website. To evaluate these risks, we propose SafeArena, the first benchmark to focus on the deliberate misuse of web agents. SafeArena comprises 250 safe and 250 harmful tasks across four websites. We classify the harmful tasks into five harm categories -- misinformation, illegal activity, harassment, cybercrime, and social bias, designed to assess realistic misuses of web agents. We evaluate leading LLM-based web agents, including GPT-4o, Claude-3.5 Sonnet, Qwen-2-VL 72B, and Llama-3.2 90B, on our benchmark. To systematically assess their susceptibility to harmful tasks, we introduce the Agent Risk Assessment framework that categorizes agent behavior across four risk levels. We find agents are surprisingly compliant with malicious requests, with GPT-4o and Qwen-2 completing 34.7% and 27.3% of harmful requests, respectively. Our findings highlight the urgent need for safety alignment procedures for web agents. Our benchmark is available here: https://safearena.github.io

Autonomous AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) with structured function-calling interfaces have dramatically expanded capabilities for real-time data retrieval, complex computation, and multi-step orchestration. Yet, the explosive proliferation of plugins, connectors, and inter-agent protocols has outpaced discovery mechanisms and security practices, resulting in brittle integrations vulnerable to diverse threats. In this survey, we introduce the first unified, end-to-end threat model for LLM-agent ecosystems, spanning host-to-tool and agent-to-agent communications, formalize adversary capabilities and attacker objectives, and catalog over thirty attack techniques. Specifically, we organized the threat model into four domains: Input Manipulation (e.g., prompt injections, long-context hijacks, multimodal adversarial inputs), Model Compromise (e.g., prompt- and parameter-level backdoors, composite and encrypted multi-backdoors, poisoning strategies), System and Privacy Attacks (e.g., speculative side-channels, membership inference, retrieval poisoning, social-engineering simulations), and Protocol Vulnerabilities (e.g., exploits in Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), Agent Network Protocol (ANP), and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol). For each category, we review representative scenarios, assess real-world feasibility, and evaluate existing defenses. Building on our threat taxonomy, we identify key open challenges and future research directions, such as securing MCP deployments through dynamic trust management and cryptographic provenance tracking; designing and hardening Agentic Web Interfaces; and achieving resilience in multi-agent and federated environments. Our work provides a comprehensive reference to guide the design of robust defense mechanisms and establish best practices for resilient LLM-agent workflows.

A distribution inference attack aims to infer statistical properties of data used to train machine learning models. These attacks are sometimes surprisingly potent, but the factors that impact distribution inference risk are not well understood and demonstrated attacks often rely on strong and unrealistic assumptions such as full knowledge of training environments even in supposedly black-box threat scenarios. To improve understanding of distribution inference risks, we develop a new black-box attack that even outperforms the best known white-box attack in most settings. Using this new attack, we evaluate distribution inference risk while relaxing a variety of assumptions about the adversary's knowledge under black-box access, like known model architectures and label-only access. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of previously proposed defenses and introduce new defenses. We find that although noise-based defenses appear to be ineffective, a simple re-sampling defense can be highly effective. Code is available at https://github.com/iamgroot42/dissecting_distribution_inference

We investigate the robustness of reasoning models trained for step-by-step problem solving by introducing query-agnostic adversarial triggers - short, irrelevant text that, when appended to math problems, systematically mislead models to output incorrect answers without altering the problem's semantics. We propose CatAttack, an automated iterative attack pipeline for generating triggers on a weaker, less expensive proxy model (DeepSeek V3) and successfully transfer them to more advanced reasoning target models like DeepSeek R1 and DeepSeek R1-distilled-Qwen-32B, resulting in greater than 300% increase in the likelihood of the target model generating an incorrect answer. For example, appending, "Interesting fact: cats sleep most of their lives," to any math problem leads to more than doubling the chances of a model getting the answer wrong. Our findings highlight critical vulnerabilities in reasoning models, revealing that even state-of-the-art models remain susceptible to subtle adversarial inputs, raising security and reliability concerns. The CatAttack triggers dataset with model responses is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/collinear-ai/cat-attack-adversarial-triggers.

Decision-based evasion attacks repeatedly query a black-box classifier to generate adversarial examples. Prior work measures the cost of such attacks by the total number of queries made to the classifier. We argue this metric is flawed. Most security-critical machine learning systems aim to weed out "bad" data (e.g., malware, harmful content, etc). Queries to such systems carry a fundamentally asymmetric cost: queries detected as "bad" come at a higher cost because they trigger additional security filters, e.g., usage throttling or account suspension. Yet, we find that existing decision-based attacks issue a large number of "bad" queries, which likely renders them ineffective against security-critical systems. We then design new attacks that reduce the number of bad queries by 1.5-7.3times, but often at a significant increase in total (non-bad) queries. We thus pose it as an open problem to build black-box attacks that are more effective under realistic cost metrics.

Releasing open-source large language models (LLMs) presents a dual-use risk since bad actors can easily fine-tune these models for harmful purposes. Even without the open release of weights, weight stealing and fine-tuning APIs make closed models vulnerable to harmful fine-tuning attacks (HFAs). While safety measures like preventing jailbreaks and improving safety guardrails are important, such measures can easily be reversed through fine-tuning. In this work, we propose Representation Noising (RepNoise), a defence mechanism that is effective even when attackers have access to the weights and the defender no longer has any control. RepNoise works by removing information about harmful representations such that it is difficult to recover them during fine-tuning. Importantly, our defence is also able to generalize across different subsets of harm that have not been seen during the defence process. Our method does not degrade the general capability of LLMs and retains the ability to train the model on harmless tasks. We provide empirical evidence that the effectiveness of our defence lies in its "depth": the degree to which information about harmful representations is removed across all layers of the LLM.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attack, which does not affect the network's performance on clean data but would manipulate the network behavior once a trigger pattern is added. Existing defense methods have greatly reduced attack success rate, but their prediction accuracy on clean data still lags behind a clean model by a large margin. Inspired by the stealthiness and effectiveness of backdoor attack, we propose a simple but highly effective defense framework which injects non-adversarial backdoors targeting poisoned samples. Following the general steps in backdoor attack, we detect a small set of suspected samples and then apply a poisoning strategy to them. The non-adversarial backdoor, once triggered, suppresses the attacker's backdoor on poisoned data, but has limited influence on clean data. The defense can be carried out during data preprocessing, without any modification to the standard end-to-end training pipeline. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks with different architectures and representative attacks. Results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art defense effectiveness with by far the lowest performance drop on clean data. Considering the surprising defense ability displayed by our framework, we call for more attention to utilizing backdoor for backdoor defense. Code is available at https://github.com/damianliumin/non-adversarial_backdoor.

It has recently been shown that adversarial attacks on large language models (LLMs) can "jailbreak" the model into making harmful statements. In this work, we argue that the spectrum of adversarial attacks on LLMs is much larger than merely jailbreaking. We provide a broad overview of possible attack surfaces and attack goals. Based on a series of concrete examples, we discuss, categorize and systematize attacks that coerce varied unintended behaviors, such as misdirection, model control, denial-of-service, or data extraction. We analyze these attacks in controlled experiments, and find that many of them stem from the practice of pre-training LLMs with coding capabilities, as well as the continued existence of strange "glitch" tokens in common LLM vocabularies that should be removed for security reasons.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an emerging standard designed to enable seamless interaction between Large Language Model (LLM) applications and external tools or resources. Within a short period, thousands of MCP services have already been developed and deployed. However, the client-server integration architecture inherent in MCP may expand the attack surface against LLM Agent systems, introducing new vulnerabilities that allow attackers to exploit by designing malicious MCP servers. In this paper, we present the first systematic study of attack vectors targeting the MCP ecosystem. Our analysis identifies four categories of attacks, i.e., Tool Poisoning Attacks, Puppet Attacks, Rug Pull Attacks, and Exploitation via Malicious External Resources. To evaluate the feasibility of these attacks, we conduct experiments following the typical steps of launching an attack through malicious MCP servers: upload-download-attack. Specifically, we first construct malicious MCP servers and successfully upload them to three widely used MCP aggregation platforms. The results indicate that current audit mechanisms are insufficient to identify and prevent the proposed attack methods. Next, through a user study and interview with 20 participants, we demonstrate that users struggle to identify malicious MCP servers and often unknowingly install them from aggregator platforms. Finally, we demonstrate that these attacks can trigger harmful behaviors within the user's local environment-such as accessing private files or controlling devices to transfer digital assets-by deploying a proof-of-concept (PoC) framework against five leading LLMs. Additionally, based on interview results, we discuss four key challenges faced by the current security ecosystem surrounding MCP servers. These findings underscore the urgent need for robust security mechanisms to defend against malicious MCP servers.

Backdoor learning is an emerging and vital topic for studying deep neural networks' vulnerability (DNNs). Many pioneering backdoor attack and defense methods are being proposed, successively or concurrently, in the status of a rapid arms race. However, we find that the evaluations of new methods are often unthorough to verify their claims and accurate performance, mainly due to the rapid development, diverse settings, and the difficulties of implementation and reproducibility. Without thorough evaluations and comparisons, it is not easy to track the current progress and design the future development roadmap of the literature. To alleviate this dilemma, we build a comprehensive benchmark of backdoor learning called BackdoorBench. It consists of an extensible modular-based codebase (currently including implementations of 8 state-of-the-art (SOTA) attacks and 9 SOTA defense algorithms) and a standardized protocol of complete backdoor learning. We also provide comprehensive evaluations of every pair of 8 attacks against 9 defenses, with 5 poisoning ratios, based on 5 models and 4 datasets, thus 8,000 pairs of evaluations in total. We present abundant analysis from different perspectives about these 8,000 evaluations, studying the effects of different factors in backdoor learning. All codes and evaluations of BackdoorBench are publicly available at https://backdoorbench.github.io.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance in capability and influence, ensuring their security and preventing harmful outputs has become crucial. A promising approach to address these concerns involves training models to automatically generate adversarial prompts for red teaming. However, the evolving subtlety of vulnerabilities in LLMs challenges the effectiveness of current adversarial methods, which struggle to specifically target and explore the weaknesses of these models. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Self-Evolving Adversarial Safety (SEAS) optimization framework, which enhances security by leveraging data generated by the model itself. SEAS operates through three iterative stages: Initialization, Attack, and Adversarial Optimization, refining both the Red Team and Target models to improve robustness and safety. This framework reduces reliance on manual testing and significantly enhances the security capabilities of LLMs. Our contributions include a novel adversarial framework, a comprehensive safety dataset, and after three iterations, the Target model achieves a security level comparable to GPT-4, while the Red Team model shows a marked increase in attack success rate (ASR) against advanced models.

This study probes the vulnerabilities of cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (c-MARL) under adversarial attacks, a critical determinant of c-MARL's worst-case performance prior to real-world implementation. Current observation-based attacks, constrained by white-box assumptions, overlook c-MARL's complex multi-agent interactions and cooperative objectives, resulting in impractical and limited attack capabilities. To address these shortcomes, we propose Adversarial Minority Influence (AMI), a practical and strong for c-MARL. AMI is a practical black-box attack and can be launched without knowing victim parameters. AMI is also strong by considering the complex multi-agent interaction and the cooperative goal of agents, enabling a single adversarial agent to unilaterally misleads majority victims to form targeted worst-case cooperation. This mirrors minority influence phenomena in social psychology. To achieve maximum deviation in victim policies under complex agent-wise interactions, our unilateral attack aims to characterize and maximize the impact of the adversary on the victims. This is achieved by adapting a unilateral agent-wise relation metric derived from mutual information, thereby mitigating the adverse effects of victim influence on the adversary. To lead the victims into a jointly detrimental scenario, our targeted attack deceives victims into a long-term, cooperatively harmful situation by guiding each victim towards a specific target, determined through a trial-and-error process executed by a reinforcement learning agent. Through AMI, we achieve the first successful attack against real-world robot swarms and effectively fool agents in simulated environments into collectively worst-case scenarios, including Starcraft II and Multi-agent Mujoco. The source code and demonstrations can be found at: https://github.com/DIG-Beihang/AMI.

Deploying machine learning models in production may allow adversaries to infer sensitive information about training data. There is a vast literature analyzing different types of inference risks, ranging from membership inference to reconstruction attacks. Inspired by the success of games (i.e., probabilistic experiments) to study security properties in cryptography, some authors describe privacy inference risks in machine learning using a similar game-based style. However, adversary capabilities and goals are often stated in subtly different ways from one presentation to the other, which makes it hard to relate and compose results. In this paper, we present a game-based framework to systematize the body of knowledge on privacy inference risks in machine learning. We use this framework to (1) provide a unifying structure for definitions of inference risks, (2) formally establish known relations among definitions, and (3) to uncover hitherto unknown relations that would have been difficult to spot otherwise.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, it is prudent to assess whether safety measures remain effective even if LLMs intentionally try to bypass them. Previous work introduced control evaluations, an adversarial framework for testing deployment strategies of untrusted models (i.e., models which might be trying to bypass safety measures). While prior work treats a single failure as unacceptable, we perform control evaluations in a "distributed threat setting" -- a setting where no single action is catastrophic and no single action provides overwhelming evidence of misalignment. We approach this problem with a two-level deployment framework that uses an adaptive macro-protocol to choose between micro-protocols. Micro-protocols operate on a single task, using a less capable, but extensively tested (trusted) model to harness and monitor the untrusted model. Meanwhile, the macro-protocol maintains an adaptive credence on the untrusted model's alignment based on its past actions, using it to pick between safer and riskier micro-protocols. We evaluate our method in a code generation testbed where a red team attempts to generate subtly backdoored code with an LLM whose deployment is safeguarded by a blue team. We plot Pareto frontiers of safety (# of non-backdoored solutions) and usefulness (# of correct solutions). At a given level of usefulness, our adaptive deployment strategy reduces the number of backdoors by 80% compared to non-adaptive baselines.

In light of the burgeoning success of reinforcement learning (RL) in diverse real-world applications, considerable focus has been directed towards ensuring RL policies are robust to adversarial attacks during test time. Current approaches largely revolve around solving a minimax problem to prepare for potential worst-case scenarios. While effective against strong attacks, these methods often compromise performance in the absence of attacks or the presence of only weak attacks. To address this, we study policy robustness under the well-accepted state-adversarial attack model, extending our focus beyond only worst-case attacks. We first formalize this task at test time as a regret minimization problem and establish its intrinsic hardness in achieving sublinear regret when the baseline policy is from a general continuous policy class, Pi. This finding prompts us to refine the baseline policy class Pi prior to test time, aiming for efficient adaptation within a finite policy class Pi, which can resort to an adversarial bandit subroutine. In light of the importance of a small, finite Pi, we propose a novel training-time algorithm to iteratively discover non-dominated policies, forming a near-optimal and minimal Pi, thereby ensuring both robustness and test-time efficiency. Empirical validation on the Mujoco corroborates the superiority of our approach in terms of natural and robust performance, as well as adaptability to various attack scenarios.

The rapid integration of agentic AI into high-stakes real-world applications requires robust oversight mechanisms. The emerging field of AI Control (AIC) aims to provide such an oversight mechanism, but practical adoption depends heavily on implementation overhead. To study this problem better, we introduce the notion of Control tax -- the operational and financial cost of integrating control measures into AI pipelines. Our work makes three key contributions to the field of AIC: (1) we introduce a theoretical framework that quantifies the Control Tax and maps classifier performance to safety assurances; (2) we conduct comprehensive evaluations of state-of-the-art language models in adversarial settings, where attacker models insert subtle backdoors into code while monitoring models attempt to detect these vulnerabilities; and (3) we provide empirical financial cost estimates for control protocols and develop optimized monitoring strategies that balance safety and cost-effectiveness while accounting for practical constraints like auditing budgets. Our framework enables practitioners to make informed decisions by systematically connecting safety guarantees with their costs, advancing AIC through principled economic feasibility assessment across different deployment contexts.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, but their deployment has exposed critical vulnerabilities, particularly to jailbreak attacks that circumvent safety mechanisms. Guardrails--external defense mechanisms that monitor and control LLM interaction--have emerged as a promising solution. However, the current landscape of LLM guardrails is fragmented, lacking a unified taxonomy and comprehensive evaluation framework. In this Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) paper, we present the first holistic analysis of jailbreak guardrails for LLMs. We propose a novel, multi-dimensional taxonomy that categorizes guardrails along six key dimensions, and introduce a Security-Efficiency-Utility evaluation framework to assess their practical effectiveness. Through extensive analysis and experiments, we identify the strengths and limitations of existing guardrail approaches, explore their universality across attack types, and provide insights into optimizing defense combinations. Our work offers a structured foundation for future research and development, aiming to guide the principled advancement and deployment of robust LLM guardrails. The code is available at https://github.com/xunguangwang/SoK4JailbreakGuardrails.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been used to solve different day-to-day problems. Recently, DNNs have been deployed in real-time systems, and lowering the energy consumption and response time has become the need of the hour. To address this scenario, researchers have proposed incorporating dynamic mechanism to static DNNs (SDNN) to create Dynamic Neural Networks (DyNNs) performing dynamic amounts of computation based on the input complexity. Although incorporating dynamic mechanism into SDNNs would be preferable in real-time systems, it also becomes important to evaluate how the introduction of dynamic mechanism impacts the robustness of the models. However, there has not been a significant number of works focusing on the robustness trade-off between SDNNs and DyNNs. To address this issue, we propose to investigate the robustness of dynamic mechanism in DyNNs and how dynamic mechanism design impacts the robustness of DyNNs. For that purpose, we evaluate three research questions. These evaluations are performed on three models and two datasets. Through the studies, we find that attack transferability from DyNNs to SDNNs is higher than attack transferability from SDNNs to DyNNs. Also, we find that DyNNs can be used to generate adversarial samples more efficiently than SDNNs. Then, through research studies, we provide insight into the design choices that can increase robustness of DyNNs against the attack generated using static model. Finally, we propose a novel attack to understand the additional attack surface introduced by the dynamic mechanism and provide design choices to improve robustness against the attack.

In a federated learning (FL) system, distributed clients upload their local models to a central server to aggregate into a global model. Malicious clients may plant backdoors into the global model through uploading poisoned local models, causing images with specific patterns to be misclassified into some target labels. Backdoors planted by current attacks are not durable, and vanish quickly once the attackers stop model poisoning. In this paper, we investigate the connection between the durability of FL backdoors and the relationships between benign images and poisoned images (i.e., the images whose labels are flipped to the target label during local training). Specifically, benign images with the original and the target labels of the poisoned images are found to have key effects on backdoor durability. Consequently, we propose a novel attack, Chameleon, which utilizes contrastive learning to further amplify such effects towards a more durable backdoor. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Chameleon significantly extends the backdoor lifespan over baselines by 1.2times sim 4times, for a wide range of image datasets, backdoor types, and model architectures.

We show that even the most recent safety-aligned LLMs are not robust to simple adaptive jailbreaking attacks. First, we demonstrate how to successfully leverage access to logprobs for jailbreaking: we initially design an adversarial prompt template (sometimes adapted to the target LLM), and then we apply random search on a suffix to maximize the target logprob (e.g., of the token "Sure"), potentially with multiple restarts. In this way, we achieve nearly 100\% attack success rate -- according to GPT-4 as a judge -- on GPT-3.5/4, Llama-2-Chat-7B/13B/70B, Gemma-7B, and R2D2 from HarmBench that was adversarially trained against the GCG attack. We also show how to jailbreak all Claude models -- that do not expose logprobs -- via either a transfer or prefilling attack with 100\% success rate. In addition, we show how to use random search on a restricted set of tokens for finding trojan strings in poisoned models -- a task that shares many similarities with jailbreaking -- which is the algorithm that brought us the first place in the SaTML'24 Trojan Detection Competition. The common theme behind these attacks is that adaptivity is crucial: different models are vulnerable to different prompting templates (e.g., R2D2 is very sensitive to in-context learning prompts), some models have unique vulnerabilities based on their APIs (e.g., prefilling for Claude), and in some settings it is crucial to restrict the token search space based on prior knowledge (e.g., for trojan detection). We provide the code, prompts, and logs of the attacks at https://github.com/tml-epfl/llm-adaptive-attacks.

State-of-the-art membership inference attacks (MIAs) typically require training many reference models, making it difficult to scale these attacks to large pre-trained language models (LLMs). As a result, prior research has either relied on weaker attacks that avoid training reference models (e.g., fine-tuning attacks), or on stronger attacks applied to small-scale models and datasets. However, weaker attacks have been shown to be brittle - achieving close-to-arbitrary success - and insights from strong attacks in simplified settings do not translate to today's LLMs. These challenges have prompted an important question: are the limitations observed in prior work due to attack design choices, or are MIAs fundamentally ineffective on LLMs? We address this question by scaling LiRA - one of the strongest MIAs - to GPT-2 architectures ranging from 10M to 1B parameters, training reference models on over 20B tokens from the C4 dataset. Our results advance the understanding of MIAs on LLMs in three key ways: (1) strong MIAs can succeed on pre-trained LLMs; (2) their effectiveness, however, remains limited (e.g., AUC<0.7) in practical settings; and, (3) the relationship between MIA success and related privacy metrics is not as straightforward as prior work has suggested.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are improving at an exceptional rate. With the advent of agentic workflows, multi-turn dialogue has become the de facto mode of interaction with LLMs for completing long and complex tasks. While LLM capabilities continue to improve, they remain increasingly susceptible to jailbreaking, especially in multi-turn scenarios where harmful intent can be subtly injected across the conversation to produce nefarious outcomes. While single-turn attacks have been extensively explored, adaptability, efficiency and effectiveness continue to remain key challenges for their multi-turn counterparts. To address these gaps, we present PLAGUE, a novel plug-and-play framework for designing multi-turn attacks inspired by lifelong-learning agents. PLAGUE dissects the lifetime of a multi-turn attack into three carefully designed phases (Primer, Planner and Finisher) that enable a systematic and information-rich exploration of the multi-turn attack family. Evaluations show that red-teaming agents designed using PLAGUE achieve state-of-the-art jailbreaking results, improving attack success rates (ASR) by more than 30% across leading models in a lesser or comparable query budget. Particularly, PLAGUE enables an ASR (based on StrongReject) of 81.4% on OpenAI's o3 and 67.3% on Claude's Opus 4.1, two models that are considered highly resistant to jailbreaks in safety literature. Our work offers tools and insights to understand the importance of plan initialization, context optimization and lifelong learning in crafting multi-turn attacks for a comprehensive model vulnerability evaluation.

Neural ranking models (NRMs) have attracted considerable attention in information retrieval. Unfortunately, NRMs may inherit the adversarial vulnerabilities of general neural networks, which might be leveraged by black-hat search engine optimization practitioners. Recently, adversarial attacks against NRMs have been explored in the paired attack setting, generating an adversarial perturbation to a target document for a specific query. In this paper, we focus on a more general type of perturbation and introduce the topic-oriented adversarial ranking attack task against NRMs, which aims to find an imperceptible perturbation that can promote a target document in ranking for a group of queries with the same topic. We define both static and dynamic settings for the task and focus on decision-based black-box attacks. We propose a novel framework to improve topic-oriented attack performance based on a surrogate ranking model. The attack problem is formalized as a Markov decision process (MDP) and addressed using reinforcement learning. Specifically, a topic-oriented reward function guides the policy to find a successful adversarial example that can be promoted in rankings to as many queries as possible in a group. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework can significantly outperform existing attack strategies, and we conclude by re-iterating that there exist potential risks for applying NRMs in the real world.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has advanced greatly in the past few years with the employment of effective deep neural networks (DNNs) on the policy networks. With the great effectiveness came serious vulnerability issues with DNNs that small adversarial perturbations on the input can change the output of the network. Several works have pointed out that learned agents with a DNN policy network can be manipulated against achieving the original task through a sequence of small perturbations on the input states. In this paper, we demonstrate furthermore that it is also possible to impose an arbitrary adversarial reward on the victim policy network through a sequence of attacks. Our method involves the latest adversarial attack technique, Adversarial Transformer Network (ATN), that learns to generate the attack and is easy to integrate into the policy network. As a result of our attack, the victim agent is misguided to optimise for the adversarial reward over time. Our results expose serious security threats for RL applications in safety-critical systems including drones, medical analysis, and self-driving cars.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have become powerful tools for complex problem solving, but their structured reasoning pathways can lead to unsafe outputs when exposed to harmful prompts. Existing safety alignment methods reduce harmful outputs but can degrade reasoning depth, leading to significant trade-offs in complex, multi-step tasks, and remain vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreak attacks. To address this, we introduce SAFEPATH, a lightweight alignment method that fine-tunes LRMs to emit a short, 8-token Safety Primer at the start of their reasoning, in response to harmful prompts, while leaving the rest of the reasoning process unsupervised. Empirical results across multiple benchmarks indicate that SAFEPATH effectively reduces harmful outputs while maintaining reasoning performance. Specifically, SAFEPATH reduces harmful responses by up to 90.0% and blocks 83.3% of jailbreak attempts in the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B model, while requiring 295.9x less compute than Direct Refusal and 314.1x less than SafeChain. We further introduce a zero-shot variant that requires no fine-tuning. In addition, we provide a comprehensive analysis of how existing methods in LLMs generalize, or fail, when applied to reasoning-centric models, revealing critical gaps and new directions for safer AI.

Creating secure and resilient applications with large language models (LLM) requires anticipating, adjusting to, and countering unforeseen threats. Red-teaming has emerged as a critical technique for identifying vulnerabilities in real-world LLM implementations. This paper presents a detailed threat model and provides a systematization of knowledge (SoK) of red-teaming attacks on LLMs. We develop a taxonomy of attacks based on the stages of the LLM development and deployment process and extract various insights from previous research. In addition, we compile methods for defense and practical red-teaming strategies for practitioners. By delineating prominent attack motifs and shedding light on various entry points, this paper provides a framework for improving the security and robustness of LLM-based systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized artificial intelligence and machine learning through their advanced text processing and generating capabilities. However, their widespread deployment has raised significant safety and reliability concerns. Established vulnerabilities in deep neural networks, coupled with emerging threat models, may compromise security evaluations and create a false sense of security. Given the extensive research in the field of LLM security, we believe that summarizing the current state of affairs will help the research community better understand the present landscape and inform future developments. This paper reviews current research on LLM vulnerabilities and threats, and evaluates the effectiveness of contemporary defense mechanisms. We analyze recent studies on attack vectors and model weaknesses, providing insights into attack mechanisms and the evolving threat landscape. We also examine current defense strategies, highlighting their strengths and limitations. By contrasting advancements in attack and defense methodologies, we identify research gaps and propose future directions to enhance LLM security. Our goal is to advance the understanding of LLM safety challenges and guide the development of more robust security measures.

Automated red-teaming has become a crucial approach for uncovering vulnerabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, most existing methods focus on isolated safety flaws, limiting their ability to adapt to dynamic defenses and uncover complex vulnerabilities efficiently. To address this challenge, we propose Auto-RT, a reinforcement learning framework that automatically explores and optimizes complex attack strategies to effectively uncover security vulnerabilities through malicious queries. Specifically, we introduce two key mechanisms to reduce exploration complexity and improve strategy optimization: 1) Early-terminated Exploration, which accelerate exploration by focusing on high-potential attack strategies; and 2) Progressive Reward Tracking algorithm with intermediate downgrade models, which dynamically refine the search trajectory toward successful vulnerability exploitation. Extensive experiments across diverse LLMs demonstrate that, by significantly improving exploration efficiency and automatically optimizing attack strategies, Auto-RT detects a boarder range of vulnerabilities, achieving a faster detection speed and 16.63\% higher success rates compared to existing methods.

Trajectory data, which tracks movements through geographic locations, is crucial for improving real-world applications. However, collecting such sensitive data raises considerable privacy concerns. Local differential privacy (LDP) offers a solution by allowing individuals to locally perturb their trajectory data before sharing it. Despite its privacy benefits, LDP protocols are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, where attackers inject fake data to manipulate aggregated results. In this work, we make the first attempt to analyze vulnerabilities in several representative LDP trajectory protocols. We propose TraP, a heuristic algorithm for data Poisoning attacks using a prefix-suffix method to optimize fake Trajectory selection, significantly reducing computational complexity. Our experimental results demonstrate that our attack can substantially increase target pattern occurrences in the perturbed trajectory dataset with few fake users. This study underscores the urgent need for robust defenses and better protocol designs to safeguard LDP trajectory data against malicious manipulation.

Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that add malicious tokens to an input prompt to bypass the safety guardrails of an LLM and cause it to produce harmful content. In this work, we introduce erase-and-check, the first framework for defending against adversarial prompts with certifiable safety guarantees. Given a prompt, our procedure erases tokens individually and inspects the resulting subsequences using a safety filter. Our safety certificate guarantees that harmful prompts are not mislabeled as safe due to an adversarial attack up to a certain size. We implement the safety filter in two ways, using Llama 2 and DistilBERT, and compare the performance of erase-and-check for the two cases. We defend against three attack modes: i) adversarial suffix, where an adversarial sequence is appended at the end of a harmful prompt; ii) adversarial insertion, where the adversarial sequence is inserted anywhere in the middle of the prompt; and iii) adversarial infusion, where adversarial tokens are inserted at arbitrary positions in the prompt, not necessarily as a contiguous block. Our experimental results demonstrate that this procedure can obtain strong certified safety guarantees on harmful prompts while maintaining good empirical performance on safe prompts. Additionally, we propose three efficient empirical defenses: i) RandEC, a randomized subsampling version of erase-and-check; ii) GreedyEC, which greedily erases tokens that maximize the softmax score of the harmful class; and iii) GradEC, which uses gradient information to optimize tokens to erase. We demonstrate their effectiveness against adversarial prompts generated by the Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) attack algorithm. The code for our experiments is available at https://github.com/aounon/certified-llm-safety.

A Membership Inference Attack (MIA) assesses how much a trained machine learning model reveals about its training data by determining whether specific query instances were included in the dataset. We classify existing MIAs into adaptive or non-adaptive, depending on whether the adversary is allowed to train shadow models on membership queries. In the adaptive setting, where the adversary can train shadow models after accessing query instances, we highlight the importance of exploiting membership dependencies between instances and propose an attack-agnostic framework called Cascading Membership Inference Attack (CMIA), which incorporates membership dependencies via conditional shadow training to boost membership inference performance. In the non-adaptive setting, where the adversary is restricted to training shadow models before obtaining membership queries, we introduce Proxy Membership Inference Attack (PMIA). PMIA employs a proxy selection strategy that identifies samples with similar behaviors to the query instance and uses their behaviors in shadow models to perform a membership posterior odds test for membership inference. We provide theoretical analyses for both attacks, and extensive experimental results demonstrate that CMIA and PMIA substantially outperform existing MIAs in both settings, particularly in the low false-positive regime, which is crucial for evaluating privacy risks.

The origin of adversarial examples is still inexplicable in research fields, and it arouses arguments from various viewpoints, albeit comprehensive investigations. In this paper, we propose a way of delving into the unexpected vulnerability in adversarially trained networks from a causal perspective, namely adversarial instrumental variable (IV) regression. By deploying it, we estimate the causal relation of adversarial prediction under an unbiased environment dissociated from unknown confounders. Our approach aims to demystify inherent causal features on adversarial examples by leveraging a zero-sum optimization game between a casual feature estimator (i.e., hypothesis model) and worst-case counterfactuals (i.e., test function) disturbing to find causal features. Through extensive analyses, we demonstrate that the estimated causal features are highly related to the correct prediction for adversarial robustness, and the counterfactuals exhibit extreme features significantly deviating from the correct prediction. In addition, we present how to effectively inoculate CAusal FEatures (CAFE) into defense networks for improving adversarial robustness.

Penetration testing, a critical component of cybersecurity, typically requires extensive time and effort to find vulnerabilities. Beginners in this field often benefit from collaborative approaches with the community or experts. To address this, we develop CIPHER (Cybersecurity Intelligent Penetration-testing Helper for Ethical Researchers), a large language model specifically trained to assist in penetration testing tasks. We trained CIPHER using over 300 high-quality write-ups of vulnerable machines, hacking techniques, and documentation of open-source penetration testing tools. Additionally, we introduced the Findings, Action, Reasoning, and Results (FARR) Flow augmentation, a novel method to augment penetration testing write-ups to establish a fully automated pentesting simulation benchmark tailored for large language models. This approach fills a significant gap in traditional cybersecurity Q\&A benchmarks and provides a realistic and rigorous standard for evaluating AI's technical knowledge, reasoning capabilities, and practical utility in dynamic penetration testing scenarios. In our assessments, CIPHER achieved the best overall performance in providing accurate suggestion responses compared to other open-source penetration testing models of similar size and even larger state-of-the-art models like Llama 3 70B and Qwen1.5 72B Chat, particularly on insane difficulty machine setups. This demonstrates that the current capabilities of general LLMs are insufficient for effectively guiding users through the penetration testing process. We also discuss the potential for improvement through scaling and the development of better benchmarks using FARR Flow augmentation results. Our benchmark will be released publicly at https://github.com/ibndias/CIPHER.

Reasoning models generate chain-of-thought (CoT) tokens before their final output, but how this affects their vulnerability to jailbreak attacks remains unclear. While traditional language models make refusal decisions at the prompt-response boundary, we find evidence that DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B makes these decisions within its CoT generation. We identify a linear direction in activation space during CoT token generation that predicts whether the model will refuse or comply -- termed the "caution" direction because it corresponds to cautious reasoning patterns in the generated text. Ablating this direction from model activations increases harmful compliance, effectively jailbreaking the model. We additionally show that intervening only on CoT token activations suffices to control final outputs, and that incorporating this direction into prompt-based attacks improves success rates. Our findings suggest that the chain-of-thought itself is a promising new target for adversarial manipulation in reasoning models. Code available at https://github.com/ky295/reasoning-manipulation

Deep learning models are often trained on distributed, web-scale datasets crawled from the internet. In this paper, we introduce two new dataset poisoning attacks that intentionally introduce malicious examples to a model's performance. Our attacks are immediately practical and could, today, poison 10 popular datasets. Our first attack, split-view poisoning, exploits the mutable nature of internet content to ensure a dataset annotator's initial view of the dataset differs from the view downloaded by subsequent clients. By exploiting specific invalid trust assumptions, we show how we could have poisoned 0.01% of the LAION-400M or COYO-700M datasets for just $60 USD. Our second attack, frontrunning poisoning, targets web-scale datasets that periodically snapshot crowd-sourced content -- such as Wikipedia -- where an attacker only needs a time-limited window to inject malicious examples. In light of both attacks, we notify the maintainers of each affected dataset and recommended several low-overhead defenses.

Recent work has shown it is possible to construct adversarial examples that cause an aligned language model to emit harmful strings or perform harmful behavior. Existing attacks work either in the white-box setting (with full access to the model weights), or through transferability: the phenomenon that adversarial examples crafted on one model often remain effective on other models. We improve on prior work with a query-based attack that leverages API access to a remote language model to construct adversarial examples that cause the model to emit harmful strings with (much) higher probability than with transfer-only attacks. We validate our attack on GPT-3.5 and OpenAI's safety classifier; we can cause GPT-3.5 to emit harmful strings that current transfer attacks fail at, and we can evade the safety classifier with nearly 100% probability.

This technical report delves into an in-depth exploration of adversarial attacks specifically targeted at Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) utilized for image classification. The study also investigates defense mechanisms aimed at bolstering the robustness of machine learning models. The research focuses on comprehending the ramifications of two prominent attack methodologies: the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and the Carlini-Wagner (CW) approach. These attacks are examined concerning three pre-trained image classifiers: Resnext50_32x4d, DenseNet-201, and VGG-19, utilizing the Tiny-ImageNet dataset. Furthermore, the study proposes the robustness of defensive distillation as a defense mechanism to counter FGSM and CW attacks. This defense mechanism is evaluated using the CIFAR-10 dataset, where CNN models, specifically resnet101 and Resnext50_32x4d, serve as the teacher and student models, respectively. The proposed defensive distillation model exhibits effectiveness in thwarting attacks such as FGSM. However, it is noted to remain susceptible to more sophisticated techniques like the CW attack. The document presents a meticulous validation of the proposed scheme. It provides detailed and comprehensive results, elucidating the efficacy and limitations of the defense mechanisms employed. Through rigorous experimentation and analysis, the study offers insights into the dynamics of adversarial attacks on DNNs, as well as the effectiveness of defensive strategies in mitigating their impact.

Most existing works focus on direct perturbations to the victim's state/action or the underlying transition dynamics to demonstrate the vulnerability of reinforcement learning agents to adversarial attacks. However, such direct manipulations may not be always realizable. In this paper, we consider a multi-agent setting where a well-trained victim agent nu is exploited by an attacker controlling another agent alpha with an adversarial policy. Previous models do not account for the possibility that the attacker may only have partial control over alpha or that the attack may produce easily detectable "abnormal" behaviors. Furthermore, there is a lack of provably efficient defenses against these adversarial policies. To address these limitations, we introduce a generalized attack framework that has the flexibility to model to what extent the adversary is able to control the agent, and allows the attacker to regulate the state distribution shift and produce stealthier adversarial policies. Moreover, we offer a provably efficient defense with polynomial convergence to the most robust victim policy through adversarial training with timescale separation. This stands in sharp contrast to supervised learning, where adversarial training typically provides only empirical defenses. Using the Robosumo competition experiments, we show that our generalized attack formulation results in much stealthier adversarial policies when maintaining the same winning rate as baselines. Additionally, our adversarial training approach yields stable learning dynamics and less exploitable victim policies.

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS), known for its groundbreaking performance and efficiency, has become a dominant 3D representation and brought progress to many 3D vision tasks. However, in this work, we reveal a significant security vulnerability that has been largely overlooked in 3DGS: the computation cost of training 3DGS could be maliciously tampered by poisoning the input data. By developing an attack named Poison-splat, we reveal a novel attack surface where the adversary can poison the input images to drastically increase the computation memory and time needed for 3DGS training, pushing the algorithm towards its worst computation complexity. In extreme cases, the attack can even consume all allocable memory, leading to a Denial-of-Service (DoS) that disrupts servers, resulting in practical damages to real-world 3DGS service vendors. Such a computation cost attack is achieved by addressing a bi-level optimization problem through three tailored strategies: attack objective approximation, proxy model rendering, and optional constrained optimization. These strategies not only ensure the effectiveness of our attack but also make it difficult to defend with simple defensive measures. We hope the revelation of this novel attack surface can spark attention to this crucial yet overlooked vulnerability of 3DGS systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiahaolu97/poison-splat .

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as the backend for a variety of real-world applications called LLM-Integrated Applications. Multiple recent works showed that LLM-Integrated Applications are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, in which an attacker injects malicious instruction/data into the input of those applications such that they produce results as the attacker desires. However, existing works are limited to case studies. As a result, the literature lacks a systematic understanding of prompt injection attacks and their defenses. We aim to bridge the gap in this work. In particular, we propose a general framework to formalize prompt injection attacks. Existing attacks, which are discussed in research papers and blog posts, are special cases in our framework. Our framework enables us to design a new attack by combining existing attacks. Moreover, we also propose a framework to systematize defenses against prompt injection attacks. Using our frameworks, we conduct a systematic evaluation on prompt injection attacks and their defenses with 10 LLMs and 7 tasks. We hope our frameworks can inspire future research in this field. Our code is available at https://github.com/liu00222/Open-Prompt-Injection.

Multi-turn interactions with language models (LMs) pose critical safety risks, as harmful intent can be strategically spread across exchanges. Yet, the vast majority of prior work has focused on single-turn safety, while adaptability and diversity remain among the key challenges of multi-turn red-teaming. To address these challenges, we present X-Teaming, a scalable framework that systematically explores how seemingly harmless interactions escalate into harmful outcomes and generates corresponding attack scenarios. X-Teaming employs collaborative agents for planning, attack optimization, and verification, achieving state-of-the-art multi-turn jailbreak effectiveness and diversity with success rates up to 98.1% across representative leading open-weight and closed-source models. In particular, X-Teaming achieves a 96.2% attack success rate against the latest Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, which has been considered nearly immune to single-turn attacks. Building on X-Teaming, we introduce XGuard-Train, an open-source multi-turn safety training dataset that is 20x larger than the previous best resource, comprising 30K interactive jailbreaks, designed to enable robust multi-turn safety alignment for LMs. Our work offers essential tools and insights for mitigating sophisticated conversational attacks, advancing the multi-turn safety of LMs.

Membership inference attacks serves as useful tool for fair use of language models, such as detecting potential copyright infringement and auditing data leakage. However, many current state-of-the-art attacks require access to models' hidden states or probability distribution, which prevents investigation into more widely-used, API-access only models like GPT-4. In this work, we introduce N-Gram Coverage Attack, a membership inference attack that relies solely on text outputs from the target model, enabling attacks on completely black-box models. We leverage the observation that models are more likely to memorize and subsequently generate text patterns that were commonly observed in their training data. Specifically, to make a prediction on a candidate member, N-Gram Coverage Attack first obtains multiple model generations conditioned on a prefix of the candidate. It then uses n-gram overlap metrics to compute and aggregate the similarities of these outputs with the ground truth suffix; high similarities indicate likely membership. We first demonstrate on a diverse set of existing benchmarks that N-Gram Coverage Attack outperforms other black-box methods while also impressively achieving comparable or even better performance to state-of-the-art white-box attacks - despite having access to only text outputs. Interestingly, we find that the success rate of our method scales with the attack compute budget - as we increase the number of sequences generated from the target model conditioned on the prefix, attack performance tends to improve. Having verified the accuracy of our method, we use it to investigate previously unstudied closed OpenAI models on multiple domains. We find that more recent models, such as GPT-4o, exhibit increased robustness to membership inference, suggesting an evolving trend toward improved privacy protections.

Evasion attacks are a threat to machine learning models, where adversaries attempt to affect classifiers by injecting malicious samples. An alarming side-effect of evasion attacks is their ability to transfer among different models: this property is called transferability. Therefore, an attacker can produce adversarial samples on a custom model (surrogate) to conduct the attack on a victim's organization later. Although literature widely discusses how adversaries can transfer their attacks, their experimental settings are limited and far from reality. For instance, many experiments consider both attacker and defender sharing the same dataset, balance level (i.e., how the ground truth is distributed), and model architecture. In this work, we propose the DUMB attacker model. This framework allows analyzing if evasion attacks fail to transfer when the training conditions of surrogate and victim models differ. DUMB considers the following conditions: Dataset soUrces, Model architecture, and the Balance of the ground truth. We then propose a novel testbed to evaluate many state-of-the-art evasion attacks with DUMB; the testbed consists of three computer vision tasks with two distinct datasets each, four types of balance levels, and three model architectures. Our analysis, which generated 13K tests over 14 distinct attacks, led to numerous novel findings in the scope of transferable attacks with surrogate models. In particular, mismatches between attackers and victims in terms of dataset source, balance levels, and model architecture lead to non-negligible loss of attack performance.

Recent advancements in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) have significantly impacted the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). The sensitivity of reinforcement learning algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has led to new line work on Direct Policy Optimization (DPO), which treats RLHF in a supervised learning framework. The increased practical use of these RLHF methods warrants an analysis of their vulnerabilities. In this work, we investigate the vulnerabilities of DPO to poisoning attacks under different scenarios and compare the effectiveness of preference poisoning, a first of its kind. We comprehensively analyze DPO's vulnerabilities under different types of attacks, i.e., backdoor and non-backdoor attacks, and different poisoning methods across a wide array of language models, i.e., LLama 7B, Mistral 7B, and Gemma 7B. We find that unlike PPO-based methods, which, when it comes to backdoor attacks, require at least 4\% of the data to be poisoned to elicit harmful behavior, we exploit the true vulnerabilities of DPO more simply so we can poison the model with only as much as 0.5\% of the data. We further investigate the potential reasons behind the vulnerability and how well this vulnerability translates into backdoor vs non-backdoor attacks.

The increasing deployment of large language models in security-sensitive domains necessitates rigorous evaluation of their resilience against adversarial prompt-based attacks. While previous benchmarks have focused on security evaluations with limited and predefined attack domains, such as cybersecurity attacks, they often lack a comprehensive assessment of intent-driven adversarial prompts and the consideration of real-life scenario-based multi-turn attacks. To address this gap, we present SecReEvalBench, the Security Resilience Evaluation Benchmark, which defines four novel metrics: Prompt Attack Resilience Score, Prompt Attack Refusal Logic Score, Chain-Based Attack Resilience Score and Chain-Based Attack Rejection Time Score. Moreover, SecReEvalBench employs six questioning sequences for model assessment: one-off attack, successive attack, successive reverse attack, alternative attack, sequential ascending attack with escalating threat levels and sequential descending attack with diminishing threat levels. In addition, we introduce a dataset customized for the benchmark, which incorporates both neutral and malicious prompts, categorised across seven security domains and sixteen attack techniques. In applying this benchmark, we systematically evaluate five state-of-the-art open-weighted large language models, Llama 3.1, Gemma 2, Mistral v0.3, DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen 3. Our findings offer critical insights into the strengths and weaknesses of modern large language models in defending against evolving adversarial threats. The SecReEvalBench dataset is publicly available at https://kaggle.com/datasets/5a7ee22cf9dab6c93b55a73f630f6c9b42e936351b0ae98fbae6ddaca7fe248d, which provides a groundwork for advancing research in large language model security.

Deep neural networks (DNN) have achieved unprecedented success in numerous machine learning tasks in various domains. However, the existence of adversarial examples has raised concerns about applying deep learning to safety-critical applications. As a result, we have witnessed increasing interests in studying attack and defense mechanisms for DNN models on different data types, such as images, graphs and text. Thus, it is necessary to provide a systematic and comprehensive overview of the main threats of attacks and the success of corresponding countermeasures. In this survey, we review the state of the art algorithms for generating adversarial examples and the countermeasures against adversarial examples, for the three popular data types, i.e., images, graphs and text.

Early backdoor attacks against machine learning set off an arms race in attack and defence development. Defences have since appeared demonstrating some ability to detect backdoors in models or even remove them. These defences work by inspecting the training data, the model, or the integrity of the training procedure. In this work, we show that backdoors can be added during compilation, circumventing any safeguards in the data preparation and model training stages. As an illustration, the attacker can insert weight-based backdoors during the hardware compilation step that will not be detected by any training or data-preparation process. Next, we demonstrate that some backdoors, such as ImpNet, can only be reliably detected at the stage where they are inserted and removing them anywhere else presents a significant challenge. We conclude that machine-learning model security requires assurance of provenance along the entire technical pipeline, including the data, model architecture, compiler, and hardware specification.

Stealthy hardware Trojans (HTs) inserted during the fabrication of integrated circuits can bypass the security of critical infrastructures. Although researchers have proposed many techniques to detect HTs, several limitations exist, including: (i) a low success rate, (ii) high algorithmic complexity, and (iii) a large number of test patterns. Furthermore, the most pertinent drawback of prior detection techniques stems from an incorrect evaluation methodology, i.e., they assume that an adversary inserts HTs randomly. Such inappropriate adversarial assumptions enable detection techniques to claim high HT detection accuracy, leading to a "false sense of security." Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, despite more than a decade of research on detecting HTs inserted during fabrication, there have been no concerted efforts to perform a systematic evaluation of HT detection techniques. In this paper, we play the role of a realistic adversary and question the efficacy of HT detection techniques by developing an automated, scalable, and practical attack framework, ATTRITION, using reinforcement learning (RL). ATTRITION evades eight detection techniques across two HT detection categories, showcasing its agnostic behavior. ATTRITION achieves average attack success rates of 47times and 211times compared to randomly inserted HTs against state-of-the-art HT detection techniques. We demonstrate ATTRITION's ability to evade detection techniques by evaluating designs ranging from the widely-used academic suites to larger designs such as the open-source MIPS and mor1kx processors to AES and a GPS module. Additionally, we showcase the impact of ATTRITION-generated HTs through two case studies (privilege escalation and kill switch) on the mor1kx processor. We envision that our work, along with our released HT benchmarks and models, fosters the development of better HT detection techniques.

Automated ad targeting on social media is opaque, creating risks of exploitation and invisibility to external scrutiny. Users may be steered toward harmful content while independent auditing of these processes remains blocked. Large Language Models (LLMs) raise a new concern: the potential to reverse-engineer sensitive user attributes from exposure alone. We introduce a multi-stage auditing framework to investigate these risks. First, a large-scale audit of over 435,000 ad impressions delivered to 891 Australian Facebook users reveals algorithmic biases, including disproportionate Gambling and Politics ads shown to socioeconomically vulnerable and politically aligned groups. Second, a multimodal LLM can reconstruct users' demographic profiles from ad streams, outperforming census-based baselines and matching or exceeding human performance. Our results provide the first empirical evidence that ad streams constitute rich digital footprints for public AI inference, highlighting urgent privacy risks and the need for content-level auditing and governance.

Web-scraped datasets are vulnerable to data poisoning, which can be used for backdooring deep image classifiers during training. Since training on large datasets is expensive, a model is trained once and re-used many times. Unlike adversarial examples, backdoor attacks often target specific classes rather than any class learned by the model. One might expect that targeting many classes through a naive composition of attacks vastly increases the number of poison samples. We show this is not necessarily true and more efficient, universal data poisoning attacks exist that allow controlling misclassifications from any source class into any target class with a small increase in poison samples. Our idea is to generate triggers with salient characteristics that the model can learn. The triggers we craft exploit a phenomenon we call inter-class poison transferability, where learning a trigger from one class makes the model more vulnerable to learning triggers for other classes. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our universal backdoor attacks by controlling models with up to 6,000 classes while poisoning only 0.15% of the training dataset. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Ben-Schneider-code/Universal-Backdoor-Attacks.

Recent researches have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to a security threat known as Backdoor Attack. The backdoored model will behave well in normal cases but exhibit malicious behaviours on inputs inserted with a specific backdoor trigger. Current backdoor studies on LLMs predominantly focus on instruction-tuned LLMs, while neglecting another realistic scenario where LLMs are fine-tuned on multi-turn conversational data to be chat models. Chat models are extensively adopted across various real-world scenarios, thus the security of chat models deserves increasing attention. Unfortunately, we point out that the flexible multi-turn interaction format instead increases the flexibility of trigger designs and amplifies the vulnerability of chat models to backdoor attacks. In this work, we reveal and achieve a novel backdoor attacking method on chat models by distributing multiple trigger scenarios across user inputs in different rounds, and making the backdoor be triggered only when all trigger scenarios have appeared in the historical conversations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve high attack success rates (e.g., over 90% ASR on Vicuna-7B) while successfully maintaining the normal capabilities of chat models on providing helpful responses to benign user requests. Also, the backdoor can not be easily removed by the downstream re-alignment, highlighting the importance of continued research and attention to the security concerns of chat models. Warning: This paper may contain toxic content.

To reduce development overhead and enable seamless integration between potential components comprising any given generative AI application, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) (Anthropic, 2024) has recently been released and subsequently widely adopted. The MCP is an open protocol that standardizes API calls to large language models (LLMs), data sources, and agentic tools. By connecting multiple MCP servers, each defined with a set of tools, resources, and prompts, users are able to define automated workflows fully driven by LLMs. However, we show that the current MCP design carries a wide range of security risks for end users. In particular, we demonstrate that industry-leading LLMs may be coerced into using MCP tools to compromise an AI developer's system through various attacks, such as malicious code execution, remote access control, and credential theft. To proactively mitigate these and related attacks, we introduce a safety auditing tool, MCPSafetyScanner, the first agentic tool to assess the security of an arbitrary MCP server. MCPScanner uses several agents to (a) automatically determine adversarial samples given an MCP server's tools and resources; (b) search for related vulnerabilities and remediations based on those samples; and (c) generate a security report detailing all findings. Our work highlights serious security issues with general-purpose agentic workflows while also providing a proactive tool to audit MCP server safety and address detected vulnerabilities before deployment. The described MCP server auditing tool, MCPSafetyScanner, is freely available at: https://github.com/johnhalloran321/mcpSafetyScanner

Network robustness plays a crucial role in our understanding of complex interconnected systems such as transportation, communication, and computer networks. While significant research has been conducted in the area of network robustness, no comprehensive open-source toolbox currently exists to assist researchers and practitioners in this important topic. This lack of available tools hinders reproducibility and examination of existing work, development of new research, and dissemination of new ideas. We contribute TIGER, an open-sourced Python toolbox to address these challenges. TIGER contains 22 graph robustness measures with both original and fast approximate versions; 17 failure and attack strategies; 15 heuristic and optimization-based defense techniques; and 4 simulation tools. By democratizing the tools required to study network robustness, our goal is to assist researchers and practitioners in analyzing their own networks; and facilitate the development of new research in the field. TIGER has been integrated into the Nvidia Data Science Teaching Kit available to educators across the world; and Georgia Tech's Data and Visual Analytics class with over 1,000 students. TIGER is open sourced at: https://github.com/safreita1/TIGER

Federated Learning (FL), a privacy-preserving decentralized machine learning framework, has been shown to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Current research primarily focuses on the Single-Label Backdoor Attack (SBA), wherein adversaries share a consistent target. However, a critical fact is overlooked: adversaries may be non-cooperative, have distinct targets, and operate independently, which exhibits a more practical scenario called Multi-Label Backdoor Attack (MBA). Unfortunately, prior works are ineffective in the MBA scenario since non-cooperative attackers exclude each other. In this work, we conduct an in-depth investigation to uncover the inherent constraints of the exclusion: similar backdoor mappings are constructed for different targets, resulting in conflicts among backdoor functions. To address this limitation, we propose Mirage, the first non-cooperative MBA strategy in FL that allows attackers to inject effective and persistent backdoors into the global model without collusion by constructing in-distribution (ID) backdoor mapping. Specifically, we introduce an adversarial adaptation method to bridge the backdoor features and the target distribution in an ID manner. Additionally, we further leverage a constrained optimization method to ensure the ID mapping survives in the global training dynamics. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Mirage outperforms various state-of-the-art attacks and bypasses existing defenses, achieving an average ASR greater than 97\% and maintaining over 90\% after 900 rounds. This work aims to alert researchers to this potential threat and inspire the design of effective defense mechanisms. Code has been made open-source.

We are releasing a new suite of security benchmarks for LLMs, CYBERSECEVAL 3, to continue the conversation on empirically measuring LLM cybersecurity risks and capabilities. CYBERSECEVAL 3 assesses 8 different risks across two broad categories: risk to third parties, and risk to application developers and end users. Compared to previous work, we add new areas focused on offensive security capabilities: automated social engineering, scaling manual offensive cyber operations, and autonomous offensive cyber operations. In this paper we discuss applying these benchmarks to the Llama 3 models and a suite of contemporaneous state-of-the-art LLMs, enabling us to contextualize risks both with and without mitigations in place.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring robust safety measures is paramount. To meet this crucial need, we propose SALAD-Bench, a safety benchmark specifically designed for evaluating LLMs, attack, and defense methods. Distinguished by its breadth, SALAD-Bench transcends conventional benchmarks through its large scale, rich diversity, intricate taxonomy spanning three levels, and versatile functionalities.SALAD-Bench is crafted with a meticulous array of questions, from standard queries to complex ones enriched with attack, defense modifications and multiple-choice. To effectively manage the inherent complexity, we introduce an innovative evaluators: the LLM-based MD-Judge for QA pairs with a particular focus on attack-enhanced queries, ensuring a seamless, and reliable evaluation. Above components extend SALAD-Bench from standard LLM safety evaluation to both LLM attack and defense methods evaluation, ensuring the joint-purpose utility. Our extensive experiments shed light on the resilience of LLMs against emerging threats and the efficacy of contemporary defense tactics. Data and evaluator are released under https://github.com/OpenSafetyLab/SALAD-BENCH. Warning: this paper includes examples that may be offensive or harmful.

Early research into data poisoning attacks against Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrated the ease with which backdoors could be injected. More recent LLMs add step-by-step reasoning, expanding the attack surface to include the intermediate chain-of-thought (CoT) and its inherent trait of decomposing problems into subproblems. Using these vectors for more stealthy poisoning, we introduce ``decomposed reasoning poison'', in which the attacker modifies only the reasoning path, leaving prompts and final answers clean, and splits the trigger across multiple, individually harmless components. Fascinatingly, while it remains possible to inject these decomposed poisons, reliably activating them to change final answers (rather than just the CoT) is surprisingly difficult. This difficulty arises because the models can often recover from backdoors that are activated within their thought processes. Ultimately, it appears that an emergent form of backdoor robustness is originating from the reasoning capabilities of these advanced LLMs, as well as from the architectural separation between reasoning and final answer generation.

Tool-calling has changed Large Language Model (LLM) applications by integrating external tools, significantly enhancing their functionality across diverse tasks. However, this integration also introduces new security vulnerabilities, particularly in the tool scheduling mechanisms of LLM, which have not been extensively studied. To fill this gap, we present ToolCommander, a novel framework designed to exploit vulnerabilities in LLM tool-calling systems through adversarial tool injection. Our framework employs a well-designed two-stage attack strategy. Firstly, it injects malicious tools to collect user queries, then dynamically updates the injected tools based on the stolen information to enhance subsequent attacks. These stages enable ToolCommander to execute privacy theft, launch denial-of-service attacks, and even manipulate business competition by triggering unscheduled tool-calling. Notably, the ASR reaches 91.67% for privacy theft and hits 100% for denial-of-service and unscheduled tool calling in certain cases. Our work demonstrates that these vulnerabilities can lead to severe consequences beyond simple misuse of tool-calling systems, underscoring the urgent need for robust defensive strategies to secure LLM Tool-calling systems.

Automated red teaming holds substantial promise for uncovering and mitigating the risks associated with the malicious use of large language models (LLMs), yet the field lacks a standardized evaluation framework to rigorously assess new methods. To address this issue, we introduce HarmBench, a standardized evaluation framework for automated red teaming. We identify several desirable properties previously unaccounted for in red teaming evaluations and systematically design HarmBench to meet these criteria. Using HarmBench, we conduct a large-scale comparison of 18 red teaming methods and 33 target LLMs and defenses, yielding novel insights. We also introduce a highly efficient adversarial training method that greatly enhances LLM robustness across a wide range of attacks, demonstrating how HarmBench enables codevelopment of attacks and defenses. We open source HarmBench at https://github.com/centerforaisafety/HarmBench.

Recent reasoning-based safety guardrails for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), such as deliberative alignment, have shown strong defense against jailbreak attacks. By leveraging LRMs' reasoning ability, these guardrails help the models to assess the safety of user inputs before generating final responses. The powerful reasoning ability can analyze the intention of the input query and will refuse to assist once it detects the harmful intent hidden by the jailbreak methods. Such guardrails have shown a significant boost in defense, such as the near-perfect refusal rates on the open-source gpt-oss series. Unfortunately, we find that these powerful reasoning-based guardrails can be extremely vulnerable to subtle manipulation of the input prompts, and once hijacked, can lead to even more harmful results. Specifically, we first uncover a surprisingly fragile aspect of these guardrails: simply adding a few template tokens to the input prompt can successfully bypass the seemingly powerful guardrails and lead to explicit and harmful responses. To explore further, we introduce a bag of jailbreak methods that subvert the reasoning-based guardrails. Our attacks span white-, gray-, and black-box settings and range from effortless template manipulations to fully automated optimization. Along with the potential for scalable implementation, these methods also achieve alarmingly high attack success rates (e.g., exceeding 90% across 5 different benchmarks on gpt-oss series on both local host models and online API services). Evaluations across various leading open-source LRMs confirm that these vulnerabilities are systemic, underscoring the urgent need for stronger alignment techniques for open-sourced LRMs to prevent malicious misuse. Code is open-sourced at https://chenxshuo.github.io/bag-of-tricks.

Malicious URL (Uniform Resource Locator) classification is a pivotal aspect of Cybersecurity, offering defense against web-based threats. Despite deep learning's promise in this area, its advancement is hindered by two main challenges: the scarcity of comprehensive, open-source datasets and the limitations of existing models, which either lack real-time capabilities or exhibit suboptimal performance. In order to address these gaps, we introduce a novel, multi-class dataset for malicious URL classification, distinguishing between benign, phishing and malicious URLs, named DeepURLBench. The data has been rigorously cleansed and structured, providing a superior alternative to existing datasets. Notably, the multi-class approach enhances the performance of deep learning models, as compared to a standard binary classification approach. Additionally, we propose improvements to string-based URL classifiers, applying these enhancements to URLNet. Key among these is the integration of DNS-derived features, which enrich the model's capabilities and lead to notable performance gains while preserving real-time runtime efficiency-achieving an effective balance for cybersecurity applications.

The field of software security testing, more specifically penetration testing, is an activity that requires high levels of expertise and involves many manual testing and analysis steps. This paper explores the potential usage of large-language models, such as GPT3.5, to augment penetration testers with AI sparring partners. We explore the feasibility of supplementing penetration testers with AI models for two distinct use cases: high-level task planning for security testing assignments and low-level vulnerability hunting within a vulnerable virtual machine. For the latter, we implemented a closed-feedback loop between LLM-generated low-level actions with a vulnerable virtual machine (connected through SSH) and allowed the LLM to analyze the machine state for vulnerabilities and suggest concrete attack vectors which were automatically executed within the virtual machine. We discuss promising initial results, detail avenues for improvement, and close deliberating on the ethics of providing AI-based sparring partners.

Sequential recommender systems stand out for their ability to capture users' dynamic interests and the patterns of item-to-item transitions. However, the inherent openness of sequential recommender systems renders them vulnerable to poisoning attacks, where fraudulent users are injected into the training data to manipulate learned patterns. Traditional defense strategies predominantly depend on predefined assumptions or rules extracted from specific known attacks, limiting their generalizability to unknown attack types. To solve the above problems, considering the rich open-world knowledge encapsulated in Large Language Models (LLMs), our research initially focuses on the capabilities of LLMs in the detection of unknown fraudulent activities within recommender systems, a strategy we denote as LLM4Dec. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the substantial capability of LLMs in identifying unknown fraudsters, leveraging their expansive, open-world knowledge. Building upon this, we propose the integration of LLMs into defense strategies to extend their effectiveness beyond the confines of known attacks. We propose LoRec, an advanced framework that employs LLM-Enhanced Calibration to strengthen the robustness of sequential recommender systems against poisoning attacks. LoRec integrates an LLM-enhanced CalibraTor (LCT) that refines the training process of sequential recommender systems with knowledge derived from LLMs, applying a user-wise reweighting to diminish the impact of fraudsters injected by attacks. By incorporating LLMs' open-world knowledge, the LCT effectively converts the limited, specific priors or rules into a more general pattern of fraudsters, offering improved defenses against poisoning attacks. Our comprehensive experiments validate that LoRec, as a general framework, significantly strengthens the robustness of sequential recommender systems.

The White House Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence highlights the risks of large language models (LLMs) empowering malicious actors in developing biological, cyber, and chemical weapons. To measure these risks of malicious use, government institutions and major AI labs are developing evaluations for hazardous capabilities in LLMs. However, current evaluations are private, preventing further research into mitigating risk. Furthermore, they focus on only a few, highly specific pathways for malicious use. To fill these gaps, we publicly release the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proxy (WMDP) benchmark, a dataset of 4,157 multiple-choice questions that serve as a proxy measurement of hazardous knowledge in biosecurity, cybersecurity, and chemical security. WMDP was developed by a consortium of academics and technical consultants, and was stringently filtered to eliminate sensitive information prior to public release. WMDP serves two roles: first, as an evaluation for hazardous knowledge in LLMs, and second, as a benchmark for unlearning methods to remove such hazardous knowledge. To guide progress on unlearning, we develop CUT, a state-of-the-art unlearning method based on controlling model representations. CUT reduces model performance on WMDP while maintaining general capabilities in areas such as biology and computer science, suggesting that unlearning may be a concrete path towards reducing malicious use from LLMs. We release our benchmark and code publicly at https://wmdp.ai

Autonomous agents powered by foundation models have seen widespread adoption across various real-world applications. However, they remain highly vulnerable to malicious instructions and attacks, which can result in severe consequences such as privacy breaches and financial losses. More critically, existing guardrails for LLMs are not applicable due to the complex and dynamic nature of agents. To tackle these challenges, we propose ShieldAgent, the first guardrail agent designed to enforce explicit safety policy compliance for the action trajectory of other protected agents through logical reasoning. Specifically, ShieldAgent first constructs a safety policy model by extracting verifiable rules from policy documents and structuring them into a set of action-based probabilistic rule circuits. Given the action trajectory of the protected agent, ShieldAgent retrieves relevant rule circuits and generates a shielding plan, leveraging its comprehensive tool library and executable code for formal verification. In addition, given the lack of guardrail benchmarks for agents, we introduce ShieldAgent-Bench, a dataset with 3K safety-related pairs of agent instructions and action trajectories, collected via SOTA attacks across 6 web environments and 7 risk categories. Experiments show that ShieldAgent achieves SOTA on ShieldAgent-Bench and three existing benchmarks, outperforming prior methods by 11.3% on average with a high recall of 90.1%. Additionally, ShieldAgent reduces API queries by 64.7% and inference time by 58.2%, demonstrating its high precision and efficiency in safeguarding agents.

Indiscriminate data poisoning attacks aim to decrease a model's test accuracy by injecting a small amount of corrupted training data. Despite significant interest, existing attacks remain relatively ineffective against modern machine learning (ML) architectures. In this work, we introduce the notion of model poisoning reachability as a technical tool to explore the intrinsic limits of data poisoning attacks towards target parameters (i.e., model-targeted attacks). We derive an easily computable threshold to establish and quantify a surprising phase transition phenomenon among popular ML models: data poisoning attacks can achieve certain target parameters only when the poisoning ratio exceeds our threshold. Building on existing parameter corruption attacks and refining the Gradient Canceling attack, we perform extensive experiments to confirm our theoretical findings, test the predictability of our transition threshold, and significantly improve existing indiscriminate data poisoning baselines over a range of datasets and models. Our work highlights the critical role played by the poisoning ratio, and sheds new insights on existing empirical results, attacks and mitigation strategies in data poisoning.

Numerous adversarial attack methods have been developed to generate imperceptible image perturbations that can cause erroneous predictions of state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) models, in particular, deep neural networks (DNNs). Despite intense research on adversarial attacks, little effort was made to uncover 'arcana' carried in adversarial attacks. In this work, we ask whether it is possible to infer data-agnostic victim model (VM) information (i.e., characteristics of the ML model or DNN used to generate adversarial attacks) from data-specific adversarial instances. We call this 'model parsing of adversarial attacks' - a task to uncover 'arcana' in terms of the concealed VM information in attacks. We approach model parsing via supervised learning, which correctly assigns classes of VM's model attributes (in terms of architecture type, kernel size, activation function, and weight sparsity) to an attack instance generated from this VM. We collect a dataset of adversarial attacks across 7 attack types generated from 135 victim models (configured by 5 architecture types, 3 kernel size setups, 3 activation function types, and 3 weight sparsity ratios). We show that a simple, supervised model parsing network (MPN) is able to infer VM attributes from unseen adversarial attacks if their attack settings are consistent with the training setting (i.e., in-distribution generalization assessment). We also provide extensive experiments to justify the feasibility of VM parsing from adversarial attacks, and the influence of training and evaluation factors in the parsing performance (e.g., generalization challenge raised in out-of-distribution evaluation). We further demonstrate how the proposed MPN can be used to uncover the source VM attributes from transfer attacks, and shed light on a potential connection between model parsing and attack transferability.

Despite incredible advances, deep learning has been shown to be susceptible to adversarial attacks. Numerous approaches have been proposed to train robust networks both empirically and certifiably. However, most of them defend against only a single type of attack, while recent work takes steps forward in defending against multiple attacks. In this paper, to understand multi-target robustness, we view this problem as a bargaining game in which different players (adversaries) negotiate to reach an agreement on a joint direction of parameter updating. We identify a phenomenon named player domination in the bargaining game, namely that the existing max-based approaches, such as MAX and MSD, do not converge. Based on our theoretical analysis, we design a novel framework that adjusts the budgets of different adversaries to avoid any player dominance. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that employing the proposed framework to the existing approaches significantly advances multi-target robustness.

Diffusion models have achieved great success in a range of tasks, such as image synthesis and molecule design. As such successes hinge on large-scale training data collected from diverse sources, the trustworthiness of these collected data is hard to control or audit. In this work, we aim to explore the vulnerabilities of diffusion models under potential training data manipulations and try to answer: How hard is it to perform Trojan attacks on well-trained diffusion models? What are the adversarial targets that such Trojan attacks can achieve? To answer these questions, we propose an effective Trojan attack against diffusion models, TrojDiff, which optimizes the Trojan diffusion and generative processes during training. In particular, we design novel transitions during the Trojan diffusion process to diffuse adversarial targets into a biased Gaussian distribution and propose a new parameterization of the Trojan generative process that leads to an effective training objective for the attack. In addition, we consider three types of adversarial targets: the Trojaned diffusion models will always output instances belonging to a certain class from the in-domain distribution (In-D2D attack), out-of-domain distribution (Out-D2D-attack), and one specific instance (D2I attack). We evaluate TrojDiff on CIFAR-10 and CelebA datasets against both DDPM and DDIM diffusion models. We show that TrojDiff always achieves high attack performance under different adversarial targets using different types of triggers, while the performance in benign environments is preserved. The code is available at https://github.com/chenweixin107/TrojDiff.

Large language models trained for safety and harmlessness remain susceptible to adversarial misuse, as evidenced by the prevalence of "jailbreak" attacks on early releases of ChatGPT that elicit undesired behavior. Going beyond recognition of the issue, we investigate why such attacks succeed and how they can be created. We hypothesize two failure modes of safety training: competing objectives and mismatched generalization. Competing objectives arise when a model's capabilities and safety goals conflict, while mismatched generalization occurs when safety training fails to generalize to a domain for which capabilities exist. We use these failure modes to guide jailbreak design and then evaluate state-of-the-art models, including OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude v1.3, against both existing and newly designed attacks. We find that vulnerabilities persist despite the extensive red-teaming and safety-training efforts behind these models. Notably, new attacks utilizing our failure modes succeed on every prompt in a collection of unsafe requests from the models' red-teaming evaluation sets and outperform existing ad hoc jailbreaks. Our analysis emphasizes the need for safety-capability parity -- that safety mechanisms should be as sophisticated as the underlying model -- and argues against the idea that scaling alone can resolve these safety failure modes.

The K-core of a graph is the unique maximum subgraph within which each vertex connects to K or more other vertices. The optimal K-core attack problem asks to delete the minimum number of vertices from the K-core to induce its complete collapse. A hierarchical cycle-tree packing model is introduced here for this challenging combinatorial optimization problem. We convert the temporally long-range correlated K-core pruning dynamics into locally tree-like static patterns and analyze this model through the replica-symmetric cavity method of statistical physics. A set of coarse-grained belief propagation equations are derived to predict single vertex marginal probabilities efficiently. The associated hierarchical cycle-tree guided attack ({\tt hCTGA}) algorithm is able to construct nearly optimal attack solutions for regular random graphs and Erd\"os-R\'enyi random graphs. Our cycle-tree packing model may also be helpful for constructing optimal initial conditions for other irreversible dynamical processes on sparse random graphs.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into automated, multi-stage pipelines, risk patterns that arise from unvalidated trust between processing stages become a practical concern. This paper presents a mechanism-centered taxonomy of 41 recurring risk patterns in commercial LLMs. The analysis shows that inputs are often interpreted non-neutrally and can trigger implementation-shaped responses or unintended state changes even without explicit commands. We argue that these behaviors constitute architectural failure modes and that string-level filtering alone is insufficient. To mitigate such cross-stage vulnerabilities, we recommend zero-trust architectural principles, including provenance enforcement, context sealing, and plan revalidation, and we introduce "Countermind" as a conceptual blueprint for implementing these defenses.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the future of cybersecurity through Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs). We explore LLM applications across various domains, including hardware design security, intrusion detection, software engineering, design verification, cyber threat intelligence, malware detection, and phishing detection. We present an overview of LLM evolution and its current state, focusing on advancements in models such as GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Mixtral-8x7B, BERT, Falcon2, and LLaMA. Our analysis extends to LLM vulnerabilities, such as prompt injection, insecure output handling, data poisoning, DDoS attacks, and adversarial instructions. We delve into mitigation strategies to protect these models, providing a comprehensive look at potential attack scenarios and prevention techniques. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of 42 LLM models in cybersecurity knowledge and hardware security, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. We thoroughly evaluate cybersecurity datasets for LLM training and testing, covering the lifecycle from data creation to usage and identifying gaps for future research. In addition, we review new strategies for leveraging LLMs, including techniques like Half-Quadratic Quantization (HQQ), Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), Quantized Low-Rank Adapters (QLoRA), and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). These insights aim to enhance real-time cybersecurity defenses and improve the sophistication of LLM applications in threat detection and response. Our paper provides a foundational understanding and strategic direction for integrating LLMs into future cybersecurity frameworks, emphasizing innovation and robust model deployment to safeguard against evolving cyber threats.

Evaluating the robustness of a defense model is a challenging task in adversarial robustness research. Obfuscated gradients have previously been found to exist in many defense methods and cause a false signal of robustness. In this paper, we identify a more subtle situation called Imbalanced Gradients that can also cause overestimated adversarial robustness. The phenomenon of imbalanced gradients occurs when the gradient of one term of the margin loss dominates and pushes the attack towards to a suboptimal direction. To exploit imbalanced gradients, we formulate a Margin Decomposition (MD) attack that decomposes a margin loss into individual terms and then explores the attackability of these terms separately via a two-stage process. We also propose a multi-targeted and ensemble version of our MD attack. By investigating 24 defense models proposed since 2018, we find that 11 models are susceptible to a certain degree of imbalanced gradients and our MD attack can decrease their robustness evaluated by the best standalone baseline attack by more than 1%. We also provide an in-depth investigation on the likely causes of imbalanced gradients and effective countermeasures. Our code is available at https://github.com/HanxunH/MDAttack.

While recent advancements in large language model (LLM) alignment have enabled the effective identification of malicious objectives involving scene nesting and keyword rewriting, our study reveals that these methods remain inadequate at detecting malicious objectives expressed through context within nested harmless objectives. This study identifies a previously overlooked vulnerability, which we term Attack via Implicit Reference (AIR). AIR decomposes a malicious objective into permissible objectives and links them through implicit references within the context. This method employs multiple related harmless objectives to generate malicious content without triggering refusal responses, thereby effectively bypassing existing detection techniques.Our experiments demonstrate AIR's effectiveness across state-of-the-art LLMs, achieving an attack success rate (ASR) exceeding 90% on most models, including GPT-4o, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, and Qwen-2-72B. Notably, we observe an inverse scaling phenomenon, where larger models are more vulnerable to this attack method. These findings underscore the urgent need for defense mechanisms capable of understanding and preventing contextual attacks. Furthermore, we introduce a cross-model attack strategy that leverages less secure models to generate malicious contexts, thereby further increasing the ASR when targeting other models.Our code and jailbreak artifacts can be found at https://github.com/Lucas-TY/llm_Implicit_reference.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising privacy-preserving collaborative model training paradigm without sharing raw data. However, recent studies have revealed that private information can still be leaked through shared gradient information and attacked by Gradient Inversion Attacks (GIA). While many GIA methods have been proposed, a detailed analysis, evaluation, and summary of these methods are still lacking. Although various survey papers summarize existing privacy attacks in FL, few studies have conducted extensive experiments to unveil the effectiveness of GIA and their associated limiting factors in this context. To fill this gap, we first undertake a systematic review of GIA and categorize existing methods into three types, i.e., optimization-based GIA (OP-GIA), generation-based GIA (GEN-GIA), and analytics-based GIA (ANA-GIA). Then, we comprehensively analyze and evaluate the three types of GIA in FL, providing insights into the factors that influence their performance, practicality, and potential threats. Our findings indicate that OP-GIA is the most practical attack setting despite its unsatisfactory performance, while GEN-GIA has many dependencies and ANA-GIA is easily detectable, making them both impractical. Finally, we offer a three-stage defense pipeline to users when designing FL frameworks and protocols for better privacy protection and share some future research directions from the perspectives of attackers and defenders that we believe should be pursued. We hope that our study can help researchers design more robust FL frameworks to defend against these attacks.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are increasingly important given their popularity and the diversity of applications. Yet, existing studies of their vulnerability to adversarial attacks rely on relatively small graphs. We address this gap and study how to attack and defend GNNs at scale. We propose two sparsity-aware first-order optimization attacks that maintain an efficient representation despite optimizing over a number of parameters which is quadratic in the number of nodes. We show that common surrogate losses are not well-suited for global attacks on GNNs. Our alternatives can double the attack strength. Moreover, to improve GNNs' reliability we design a robust aggregation function, Soft Median, resulting in an effective defense at all scales. We evaluate our attacks and defense with standard GNNs on graphs more than 100 times larger compared to previous work. We even scale one order of magnitude further by extending our techniques to a scalable GNN.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been gaining a lot of interest due to their adaptability and extensibility in emerging applications, including communication networks. It is anticipated that ZSM networks will be able to support LLMs as a service, as they provide ultra reliable low-latency communications and closed loop massive connectivity. However, LLMs are vulnerable to data and model privacy issues that affect the trustworthiness of LLMs to be deployed for user-based services. In this paper, we explore the security vulnerabilities associated with fine-tuning LLMs in ZSM networks, in particular the membership inference attack. We define the characteristics of an attack network that can perform a membership inference attack if the attacker has access to the fine-tuned model for the downstream task. We show that the membership inference attacks are effective for any downstream task, which can lead to a personal data breach when using LLM as a service. The experimental results show that the attack success rate of maximum 92% can be achieved on named entity recognition task. Based on the experimental analysis, we discuss possible defense mechanisms and present possible research directions to make the LLMs more trustworthy in the context of ZSM networks.