MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 73.07.04
Attacking LLMs via Additional Modalities a
Category: Jailbreaks and Prompt Injections Threaten Security of LLMs
Description
"LLMs can now process modalities other than text, e.g. images or video frames (OpenAI, 2023c; Gemini Team, 2023). Several studies show that gradient-based attacks on multimodal models are easy and effective (Carlini et al., 2023a; Bailey et al., 2023; Qi et al., 2023b). These attacks manipulate images that are input to the model (via an appropriate encoding). GPT-4Vision (OpenAI, 2023c) is vulnerable to jailbreaks and exfiltration attacks through much simpler means as well, e.g. writing jailbreaking text in the image (Willison, 2023a; Gong et al., 2023). For indirect prompt injection, the atta
From Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).
Classification
- Domain
- 2. Privacy & Security
- Causal entity
- Human
- Intent
- Intentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
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.
Real-world incidents in this subdomain
- COEMPT Quality Assurance Engineers Allegedly Violated Indian CBSE Student Data Privacy Rights by Processing It with Google Gemini
- Hidden Prompt Injection in Brazilian Labor-Court Petition Reportedly Tried to Manipulate Galileu
- Meta Internal AI Agent Reportedly Gave Advice That Allegedly Exposed Sensitive Data to Unauthorized Employees
- CodeWall's Autonomous Agent Reportedly Obtained Unauthorized Access to McKinsey's Lilli AI Platform Database
- Anthropic Said DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax Used Fraudulent Accounts and Proxies to Illicitly Distill Claude Capabilities at Scale
- DJI Romo Cloud Authorization Bug Reportedly Exposed Camera, Microphone, and Home-Mapping Data From Nearly 7,000 Robot Vacuums
How other frameworks describe this risk
Other entries from Anwar2024
- Agentic LLMs Pose Novel Risks
- Natural Language Underspecifies Goals
- Goal-Directedness Incentivizes Undesirable Behaviors
- Safety Risks from Affordances Provided to LLM-agents
- Multi-Agent Safety Is Not Assured by Single-Agent Safety
- Foundationality May Cause Correlated Failures
- Groups of LLM-Agents May Show Emergent Functionality
- Collusion between LLM-Agents
- Dual-Use Capabilities Enable Malicious Use and Misuse of LLMs
- Misinformation and Manipulation
- Cybersecurity
- Cybersecurity