MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 62.19.05

Text encoding-based attacks

Category: Attacks on GPAIs/GPAI Failure Modes

Description

"Various new or existing text encodings, such as Base64, can be employed to craft jailbreak attacks that bypass safety training [13]. Low-resource language inputs also appear more likely to circumvent a model’s safeguards [229]. Since safety fine-tuning might not involve this encoding data or may only do so to a limited extent, harmful natural language prompts could be translated into less frequently used encodings [214]."

From Risk Sources and Risk Management Measures in Support of Standards for General-Purpose AI Systems (Gipiškis2024), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).

Classification

Causal entity
Human

Subdomain definition: Vulnerabilities in AI systems, software development toolchains, and hardware that can be exploited, resulting in unauthorized access, data and privacy breaches, or system manipulation causing unsafe outputs or behavior.

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