TFL: Targeted Bit-Flip Attack on Large Language Model
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in safety and security critical applications, raising concerns about their robustness to model parameter fault injection attacks. Recent studies have shown that bit-flip attacks (BFAs), which exploit computer main memory (i.e., DRAM) vulnerabilities to flip a small number of bits in model weights, can severely disrupt LLM behavior. However, existing BFA on LLM largely induce un-targeted failure or general performance degradation, offering limited control over manipulating specific or targeted outputs. In this paper, we present TFL, a novel targeted bit-flip attack framework that enables precise manipulation of LLM outputs for selected prompts while maintaining almost no or minor degradation on unrelated inputs. Within our TFL framework, we propose a novel keyword-focused attack loss to promote attacker-specified target tokens in generative outputs, together with an auxiliary utility score that balances attack effectiveness against collateral performance impact on benign data. We evaluate TFL on multiple LLMs (Qwen, DeepSeek, Llama) and benchmarks (DROP, GSM8K, and TriviaQA). The experiments show that TFL achieves successful targeted LLM output manipulations with less than 50 bit flips and significantly reduced effect on unrelated queries compared to prior BFA approaches. This demonstrates the effectiveness of TFL and positions it as a new class of stealthy and targeted LLM model attack.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
PrisonBreak: Jailbreaking Large Language Models with Fewer Than Twenty-Five Targeted Bit-flips
We introduce a new class of attacks on commercial-scale (human-aligned) language models that induce jailbreaking through targeted bitwise corruptions in model parameters. Our adversary can jailbreak billion-parameter lan…
Computational EfficiencyYour Scale Factors are My Weapon: Targeted Bit-Flip Attacks on Vision Transformers via Scale Factor Manipulation
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have experienced significant progress and are quantized for deployment in resource-constrained applications. Quantized models are vulnerable to targeted bit-flip attacks (BFAs). A targeted …
Targeted Bit-Flip Attacks on LLM-Based Agents
Targeted bit-flip attacks (BFAs) exploit hardware faults to manipulate model parameters, posing a significant security threat. While prior work targets single-step inference models (e.g., image classifiers), LLM-based ag…
Approaching the Harm of Gradient Attacks While Only Flipping Labels
Machine learning systems deployed in distributed or federated environments are highly susceptible to adversarial manipulations, particularly availability attacks -adding imperceptible perturbations to training data, ther…
Data PoisoningT-BFA: Targeted Bit-Flip Adversarial Weight Attack
Traditional Deep Neural Network (DNN) security is mostly related to the well-known adversarial input example attack. Recently, another dimension of adversarial attack, namely, attack on DNN weight parameters, has been sh…
Adversarial AttackCPUimage-classificationImage Classification