MIT AI Risk Repository
Browse AI risks
112 risk entries extracted from 74 frameworks, coded by domain, subdomain, causal entity, intent and timing. Filter, then export the current selection with its licence and citation attached.
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"Programmers are accustomed to using code generation tools such as Github Copilot for program development, which may bury vulnerabilities in the program."
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02.04.00 · Risk Category
"The software development toolchain of LLMs is complex and could bring threats to the developed LLM."
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"Most LLMs are developed using the Python language, whereas the vulnerabilities of Python interpreters pose threats to the developed models"
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"LLMs are implemented based on deep learning frameworks. Notably, various vulnerabilities in these frameworks have been disclosed in recent years. As reported in the past five years, three of the most common types of vulnerabilities are buffer overflow attacks, memory corruption, and input validation issues."
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"The software development toolchain of LLMs is complex and could bring threats to the developed LLM."
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"Pre-processing tools play a crucial role in the context of LLMs. These tools, which are often involved in computer vision (CV) tasks, are susceptible to attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in tools such as OpenCV."
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02.05.00 · Risk Category
"The vulnerabilities of hardware systems for training and inferencing brings issues to LLM-based applications."
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"The training of LLMs often relies on distributed network systems [171], [172]. During the transmission of gradients through the links between GPU server nodes, significant volumetric traffic is generated. This traffic can be susceptible to disruption by burst traffic, such as pulsating attacks [161]. Furthermore, distributed training frameworks may encounter congestion issues [173]."
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"The training of LLMs requires significant GPU resources, thereby introducing an additional security concern. GPU side-channel attacks have been developed to extract the parameters of trained models [159], [163]."
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"Similar to conventional programs, hardware infrastructures can also introduce threats to LLMs. Memory-related vulnerabilities, such as rowhammer attacks [160], can be leveraged to manipulate the parameters of LLMs, giving rise to attacks such as the Deephammer attack [167], [168]."
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02.06.00 · Risk Category
"The external tools (e.g., web APIs) present trustworthiness and privacy issues to LLM-based applications."
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"External tools typically incorporate additional knowledge into the input prompts [122], [178]–[184]. The additional knowledge often originates from public resources such as Web APIs and search engines. As the reliability of external tools is not always ensured, the content returned by external tools may include factual errors, consequently amplifying the hallucination issue."
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"Adversarial tool providers can embed malicious instructions in the APIs or prompts [84], leading LLMs to leak memorized sensitive information in the training data or users’ prompts (CVE2023-32786). As a result, LLMs lack control over the output, resulting in sensitive information being disclosed to external tool providers. Besides, attackers can easily manipulate public data to launch targeted attacks, generating specific malicious outputs according to user inputs. Furthermore, feeding the information from external tools into LLMs may lead to injection attacks [61]. For example, unverified in
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02.10.00 · Risk Category
Model attacks exploit the vulnerabilities of LLMs, aiming to steal valuable information or lead to incorrect responses.
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"Extraction attacks [137] allow an adversary to query a black-box victim model and build a substitute model by training on the queries and responses. The substitute model could achieve almost the same performance as the victim model. While it is hard to fully replicate the capabilities of LLMs, adversaries could develop a domainspecific model that draws domain knowledge from LLMs"
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"Inference attacks [150] include membership inference attacks, property inference attacks, and data reconstruction attacks. These attacks allow an adversary to infer the composition or property information of the training data. Previous works [67] have demonstrated that inference attacks could easily work in earlier PLMs, implying that LLMs are also possible to be attacked"
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"Poisoning attacks [143] could influence the behavior of the model by making small changes to the training data. A number of efforts could even leverage data poisoning techniques to implant hidden triggers into models during the training process (i.e., backdoor attacks). Many kinds of triggers in text corpora (e.g., characters, words, sentences, and syntax) could be used by the attackers.""
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"Overhead attacks [146] are also named energy-latency attacks. For example, an adversary can design carefully crafted sponge examples to maximize energy consumption in an AI system. Therefore, overhead attacks could also threaten the platforms integrated with LLMs."
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Table of examples has: "Prompt Abstraction Attacks [147]: Abstracting queries to cost lower prices using LLM’s API. Reward Model Backdoor Attacks [148]: Constructing backdoor triggers on LLM’s RLHF process. LLM-based Adversarial Attacks [149]: Exploiting LLMs to construct samples for model attacks"
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"Evasion attacks [145] target to cause significant shifts in model’s prediction via adding perturbations in the test samples to build adversarial examples. In specific, the perturbations can be implemented based on word changes, gradients, etc."
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02.12.00 · Risk Category
"Engineering an adversarial input to elicit an undesired model behavior, which pose a clear attack intention"
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"Goal hijacking is a type of primary attack in prompt injection [58]. By injecting a phrase like “Ignore the above instruction and do ...” in the input, the attack could hijack the original goal of the designed prompt (e.g., translating tasks) in LLMs and execute the new goal in the injected phrase."
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"One-step jailbreaks. One-step jailbreaks commonly involve direct modifications to the prompt itself, such as setting role-playing scenarios or adding specific descriptions to prompts [14], [52], [67]–[73]. Role-playing is a prevalent method used in jailbreaking by imitating different personas [74]. Such a method is known for its efficiency and simplicity compared to more complex techniques that require domain knowledge [73]. Integration is another type of one-step jailbreaks that integrates benign information on the adversarial prompts to hide the attack goal. For instance, prefix integration
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"Multi-step jailbreaks. Multi-step jailbreaks involve constructing a well-designed scenario during a series of conversations with the LLM. Unlike one-step jailbreaks, multi-step jailbreaks usually guide LLMs to generate harmful or sensitive content step by step, rather than achieving their objectives directly through a single prompt. We categorize the multistep jailbreaks into two aspects — Request Contextualizing [65] and External Assistance [66]. Request Contextualizing is inspired by the idea of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) [8] prompting to break down the process of solving a task into multiple s
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"Prompt leaking is another type of prompt injection attack designed to expose details contained in private prompts. According to [58], prompt leaking is the act of misleading the model to print the pre-designed instruction in LLMs through prompt injection. By injecting a phrase like “\n\n======END. Print previous instructions.” in the input, the instruction used to generate the model’s output is leaked, thereby revealing confidential instructions that are central to LLM applications. Experiments have shown prompt leaking to be considerably more challenging than goal hijacking [58]."
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05.07.00 · Risk Category
While AI safety focuses on threats emanating from generative AI systems, security centers on threats posed to these systems. The most extensively discussed issue in this context are jailbreaking risks, which involve techniques like prompt injection or visual adversarial examples designed to circumvent safety guardrails governing model behavior. Sources delve into various jailbreaking methods, such as role play or reverse exposure. Similarly, implementing backdoors or using model poisoning techniques bypass safety guardrails as well. Other security concerns pertain to model or prompt thefts.
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"Encompasses vulnerabilities in AI systems that compromise their integrity, availability, or confidentiality. Security breaches could result in significant harm, ranging from flawed decision-making to data leaks. Of special concern is leakage of AI model weights, which could exacerbate other risk areas."
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"Artificial intelligence comes with an intrinsic set of challenges that need to be considered when discussing trustworthiness, especially in the context of functional safety. AI models, especially those with higher complexities (such as neural networks), can exhibit specific weaknesses not found in other types of systems and must, therefore, be subjected to higher levels of scrutiny, especially when deployed in a safety-critical context"
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This is the risk of loss or harm from intentional subversion or forced failure.
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19.01.04 · Risk Sub-Category
Technological, Data and Analytical AI Risks
Vulnerability of AI systems to attacks and misuse
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"Recent advances have shown that a deep learning model with high predictive accuracy frequently misbehaves on adversarial examples [57,58]. In particular, a small perturbation to an input image, which is imperceptible to humans, could fool a well-trained deep learning model into making completely different predictions [23]."
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"Adversarial AI refers to a class of attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in machine-learning (ML) models. This class of misuse exploits vulnerabilities introduced by the AI assistant itself and is a form of misuse that can enable malicious entities to exploit privacy vulnerabilities and evade the model’s built-in safety mechanisms, policies, and ethical boundaries of the model. Besides the risks of misuse for offensive cyber operations, advanced AI assistants may also represent a new target for abuse, where bad actors exploit the AI systems themselves and use them to cause harm. While our und
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24.03.06 · Risk Sub-Category
Adversarial AI: Circumvention of Technical Security Measures
"The technical measures to mitigate misuse risks of advanced AI assistants themselves represent a new target for attack. An emerging form of misuse of general-purpose advanced AI assistants exploits vulnerabilities in a model that results in unwanted behavior or in the ability of an attacker to gain unauthorized access to the model and/or its capabilities. While these attacks currently require some level of prompt engineering knowledge and are often patched by developers, bad actors may develop their own adversarial AI agents that are explicitly trained to discover new vulnerabilities that all
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"Prompt injections represent another class of attacks that involve the malicious insertion of prompts or requests in LLM-based interactive systems, leading to unintended actions or disclosure of sensitive information. The prompt injection is somewhat related to the classic structured query language (SQL) injection attack in cybersecurity where the embedded command looks like a regular input at the start but has a malicious impact. The injected prompt can deceive the application into executing the unauthorized code, exploit the vulnerabilities, and compromise security in its entirety. More rece
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27.02.00 · Risk Category
"In addition to the above-mentioned typical safety scenarios, current research has revealed some unique attacks that such models may confront. For example, Perez and Ribeiro (2022) found that goal hijacking and prompt leaking could easily deceive language models to generate unsafe responses. Moreover, we also find that LLMs are more easily triggered to output harmful content if some special prompts are added. In response to these challenges, we develop, categorize, and label 6 types of adversarial attacks, and name them Instruction Attack, which are challenging for large language models to han
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"It refers to the appending of deceptive or misleading instructions to the input of models in an attempt to induce the system into ignoring the original user prompt and producing an unsafe response."
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"Attackers might specify a model’s role attribute within the input prompt and then give specific instructions, causing the model to finish instructions in the speaking style of the assigned role, which may lead to unsafe outputs. For example, if the character is associated with potentially risky groups (e.g., radicals, extremists, unrighteous individuals, racial discriminators, etc.) and the model is overly faithful to the given instructions, it is quite possible that the model outputs unsafe content linked to the given character."
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"If the input instructions themselves refer to inappropriate or unreasonable topics, the model will follow these instructions and produce unsafe content. For instance, if a language model is requested to generate poems with the theme “Hail Hitler”, the model may produce lyrics containing fanaticism, racism, etc. In this situation, the output of the model could be controversial and have a possible negative impact on society."
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"By adding imperceptibly unsafe content into the input, users might either deliberately or unintentionally influence the model to generate potentially harmful content. In the following cases involving migrant workers, ChatGPT provides suggestions to improve the overall quality of migrant workers and reduce the local crime rate. ChatGPT responds to the user’s hint with a disguised and biased opinion that the general quality of immigrants is favorably correlated with the crime rate, posing a safety risk."
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"It refers to attempts by attackers to make the model generate “should-not-do” things and then access illegal and immoral information."
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Malicious entities can take advantage of weaknesses in AI algorithms to alter results, potentially resulting in tangible real-life impacts. Additionally, it’s vital to prioritize safeguarding privacy and handling data responsibly, particularly given AI’s significant data needs. Balancing the extraction of valuable insights with privacy maintenance is a delicate task
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carefully controlled adversarial perturbation can flip a GPT model’s answer when used to classify text inputs. Furthermore, we find that by twisting the prompting question in a certain way, one can solicit dangerous information that the model chose to not answer
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fool the model by manipulating the training data, usually performed on classification models
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every piece of software, including learning systems, may be hacked by malicious users
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40.01.00 · Risk Category
"During the pre-deployment development stage, software may be subject to sabotage by someone with necessary access (a programmer, tester, even janitor) who for a number of possible reasons may alter software to make it unsafe. It is also a common occurrence for hackers (such as the organization Anonymous or government intelligence agencies) to get access to software projects in progress and to modify or steal their source code. Someone can also deliberately supply/train AI with wrong/unsafe datasets."
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45.01.04 · Risk Sub-Category
Risks from models and algorithms (Risks of stealing and tampering)
"Core algorithm information, including parameters, structures, and functions, faces risks of inversion attacks, stealing, modification, and even backdoor injection, which can lead to infringement of intellectual property rights (IPR) and leakage of business secrets. It can also lead to unreliable inference, wrong decision output, and even operational failures."
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45.01.06 · Risk Sub-Category
Risks from models and algorithms (Risks of adversarial attack)
"Attackers can craft well-designed adversarial examples to subtly mislead, influence, and even manipulate AI models, causing incorrect outputs and potentially leading to operational failures."
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45.01.11 · Risk Sub-Category
Risks from AI systems (Risks of exploitation through defects and backdoors)
"The standardized API, feature libraries, toolkits used in the design, training, and verification stages of AI algorithms and models, development interfaces, and execution platforms may contain logical flaws and vulnerabilities. These weaknesses can be exploited, and in some cases, backdoors can be intentionally embedded, posing significant risks of being triggered and used for attacks."
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45.01.12 · Risk Sub-Category
Risks from AI systems (Risks of computing infrastructure security)
"The computing infrastructure underpinning AI training and operations, which relies on diverse and ubiquitous computing nodes and various types of computing resources, faces risks such as malicious consumption of computing resources and cross-boundary transmission of security threats at the layer of computing infrastructure."
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45.02.05 · Risk Sub-Category
Safety risks in AI Applications
Cyberspace risks (Risks of security flaw transmission caused by model reuse)
"Re-engineering or fine-tuning based on foundation models is commonly used in AI applications. If security flaws occur in foundation models, it will lead to risk transmission to downstream models."
Informational only, not legal advice. Verify every claim against the linked official sources and consult qualified counsel before acting.