Deep Learning Latency Attacks and Defenses: A Cross-Domain Survey of Availability Threats

Adversarial machine learning has focused mainly on integrity, but availability is an increasingly consequential complement. Latency attacks also energy-latency attacks increase inference-time work, energy, or response time, causing deadline misses, throughput collapse, or resource exhaustion in...

CounterSteer: Suppressing Indirect Prompt Injection with Activation Steering

Indirect prompt injection makes an LLM agent treat untrusted retrieved text as instructions. We present CounterSteer, an inference-time defense that suppresses this behavior inside the model. Per model, a five-step recipe fits a residual-stream direction from paired episodes differing only in...

AKRASIA: Stealthy Backdoor Attack on Reasoning-Based Code LLMs

We present AKRASIA, a stealthy, inference-time backdoor attack against reasoning-based Code LLMs. AKRASIA aims to achieve a backdoor target e.g., malicious code execution in reasoning LLMs while evading automated defenses and human inspection. To achieve this, AKRASIA probes the victim LLM to...

Once Poisoned, Arbitrarily Controlled: A Programmable Backdoor in VLMs

Existing vision-language model VLM backdoors are usually treated as static vulnerabilities: one-to-one and N-to-N attacks bind one or more triggers to a finite set of targets before victim training. This assumption substantially underestimates the threat. We show that a single poisoning phase can...

Agent Harness Distillation: Inference-Time Harness Extraction and Exploitation in Autonomous Multi-Agent Systems

Autonomous multi-agent systems AMAS built on large language models LLMs, such as Hermes, increasingly rely on inference-time harnesses to coordinate reasoning and action. Constructing these harnesses requires substantial engineering effort and computational resources, as they are iteratively...

DoubtProbe: Black-Box Jailbreak Defense Via Structural Verification and Semantic Auditing

As large language models LLMs are increasingly deployed in user-facing systems, black-box jailbreak defense has become an important practical problem. Existing defenses often rely on known-attack coverage, prompt-level semantic judgment, or local runtime control, yet these paths can become unstab...

SPARK: Security Knowledge Priming and Representation-Guided Knowledge Activation for LLM-Based Secure Code Generation

Large language models routinely generate code with exploitable security flaws. Prior literature attributes this limitation to a lack of security expertise, steering current defense mechanisms toward heavy fine-tuning or external knowledge retrieval, which introduces significant computational...

Sparse Autoencoders Are Capable LLM Jailbreak Mitigators

Jailbreak attacks remain a persistent threat to large language model safety. We propose Context-Conditioned Delta Steering CC-Delta, an SAE-based defense that identifies jailbreak-relevant sparse features by comparing token-level representations of the same harmful request with and without...

Kill It with FIRE: On Leveraging Latent Space Directions for Runtime Backdoor Mitigation in Deep Neural Networks

Machine learning models are increasingly present in our everyday lives; as a result, they become targets of adversarial attackers seeking to manipulate the systems we interact with. A well-known vulnerability is a backdoor introduced into a neural network by poisoned training data or a malicious...

Jailbreaking Leaves a Trace: Understanding and Detecting Jailbreak Attacks from Internal Representations of Large Language Models

Jailbreaking large language models LLMs has emerged as a critical security challenge with the widespread deployment of conversational AI systems. Adversarial users exploit these models through carefully crafted prompts to elicit restricted or unsafe outputs, a phenomenon commonly referred to as...

SecCodePRM: A Process Reward Model for Code Security

Large Language Models are rapidly becoming core components of modern software development workflows, yet ensuring code security remains challenging. Existing vulnerability detection pipelines either rely on static analyzers or use LLM/GNN-based detectors trained with coarse program-level...

Enhanced MLLM Black-Box Jailbreaking Attacks and Defenses

Multimodal large language models MLLMs comprise of both visual and textual modalities to process vision language tasks. However, MLLMs are vulnerable to security-related issues, such as jailbreak attacks that alter the model's input to induce unauthorized or harmful responses. The incorporation o...

SecInfer: Preventing Prompt Injection Via Inference-Time Scaling

Prompt injection attacks pose a pervasive threat to the security of Large Language Models LLMs. State-of-the-art prevention-based defenses typically rely on fine-tuning an LLM to enhance its security, but they achieve limited effectiveness against strong attacks. In this work, we propose...

Backdoor Attacks and Defenses in Computer Vision Domain: a Survey

Backdoor trojan attacks embed hidden, controllable behaviors into machine-learning models so that models behave normally on benign inputs but produce attacker-chosen outputs when a trigger is present. This survey reviews the rapidly growing literature on backdoor attacks and defenses in the...

Accelerating Automatic Program Repair with Dual Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning and Patch Generation on Large Language Models

Automated Program Repair APR is essential for ensuring software reliability and quality while enhancing efficiency and reducing developers' workload. Although rule-based and learning-based APR methods have demonstrated their effectiveness, their performance was constrained by the defect type of...

UCD: Unlearning in LLMs Via Contrastive Decoding

Machine unlearning aims to remove specific information, e.g. sensitive or undesirable content, from large language models LLMs while preserving overall performance. We propose an inference-time unlearning algorithm that uses contrastive decoding, leveraging two auxiliary smaller models, one train...

Watermarking Degrades Alignment in Language Models: Analysis and Mitigation

Watermarking techniques for large language models LLMs can significantly impact output quality, yet their effects on truthfulness, safety, and helpfulness remain critically underexamined. This paper presents a systematic analysis of how two popular watermarking approaches-Gumbel and KGW-affect...

Impact Analysis of Inference Time Attack of Perception Sensors on Autonomous Vehicles

As a safety-critical cyber-physical system, cybersecurity and related safety issues for Autonomous Vehicles AVs have been important research topics for a while. Among all the modules on AVs, perception is one of the most accessible attack surfaces, as drivers and AVs have no control over the...