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While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has become a standard paradigm for eliciting complex reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models, it inadvertently exposes a new attack surface for backdoor attacks. Existing CoT backdoor attacks…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Yizhe Zeng , Wei Zhang , Yunpeng Li , Juxin Xiao , Xiao Wang , Yuling Liu

The security of Large Language Model (LLM) applications is fundamentally challenged by "form-first" attacks like prompt injection and jailbreaking, where malicious instructions are embedded within user inputs. Conventional defenses, which…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Dominik Schwarz

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a foundational technique for eliciting reasoning from Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the robustness of this approach to corruptions in intermediate reasoning steps remains poorly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Ashwath Vaithinathan Aravindan , Mayank Kejriwal

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has introduced critical security challenges, where adversarial actors can manipulate input prompts to cause significant harm and circumvent safety alignments. These prompt-based attacks…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a simple and effective way to elicit step-by-step solutions from large language models (LLMs). However, CoT reasoning can be unstable across runs on long, multi-step problems, leading to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Shuxu Chen , Yitian Zhou , Jiaquan Zhang , Haoyu Bian , Aming Wu , Sungyoung Lee , Chaoning Zhang , Hyundong Shin

The deployment of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) in high-stakes decision-making pipelines has introduced a novel and opaque attack surface: reasoning backdoors. In these attacks, the model's intermediate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is manipulated…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Zhen Guo , Shanghao Shi , Hao Li , Shamim Yazdani , Ning Zhang , Reza Tourani

Prompts have significantly improved the performance of pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) on various downstream tasks recently, making them increasingly indispensable for a diverse range of LLM application scenarios. However, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Hongwei Yao , Jian Lou , Zhan Qin

Modern large reasoning models (LRMs) exhibit impressive multi-step problem-solving via chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, this iterative thinking mechanism introduces a new vulnerability surface. We present the Deadlock Attack, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Mohan Zhang , Yihua Zhang , Jinghan Jia , Zhangyang Wang , Sijia Liu , Tianlong Chen

Large Language Model-based systems (LLM systems) are information and query processing systems that use LLMs to plan operations from natural-language prompts and feed the output of each successive step into the LLM to plan the next. This…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Fangzhou Wu , Ethan Cecchetti , Chaowei Xiao

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly impacted various domains, including Web search, healthcare, and software development. However, as these models scale, they become more vulnerable to cybersecurity risks,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Qin Liu , Wenjie Mo , Terry Tong , Jiashu Xu , Fei Wang , Chaowei Xiao , Muhao Chen

Emerging large reasoning models (LRMs), such as DeepSeek-R1 models, leverage long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to generate structured intermediate steps, enhancing their reasoning capabilities. However, long CoT does not inherently…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Fengqing Jiang , Zhangchen Xu , Yuetai Li , Luyao Niu , Zhen Xiang , Bo Li , Bill Yuchen Lin , Radha Poovendran

Large language models (LLMs) have acquired the ability to handle longer context lengths and understand nuances in text, expanding their dialogue capabilities beyond a single utterance. A popular user-facing application of LLMs is the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Terry Tong , Jiashu Xu , Qin Liu , Muhao Chen

Backdoor attacks pose a serious threat to the secure deployment of large language models (LLMs), enabling adversaries to implant hidden behaviors triggered by specific inputs. However, existing methods often rely on manually crafted…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Yige Li , Zhe Li , Wei Zhao , Nay Myat Min , Hanxun Huang , Xingjun Ma , Jun Sun

Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved excellent performance in a variety of evaluation benchmarks, they still struggle in complex reasoning tasks which require specific knowledge and multi-hop reasoning. To improve the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Zhipeng Chen , Kun Zhou , Beichen Zhang , Zheng Gong , Wayne Xin Zhao , Ji-Rong Wen

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being employed in real-world applications in critical domains such as healthcare, it is important to ensure that the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning generated by these models faithfully…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Sree Harsha Tanneru , Dan Ley , Chirag Agarwal , Himabindu Lakkaraju

Customized Large Language Model (LLM) agents face a critical security threat from black-box instruction backdoors, where malicious behaviors are covertly injected through hidden system instructions. Although existing prompt-based defenses…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Zhengxian Wu , Juan Wen , Wanli Peng , Haowei Chang , Yinghan Zhou , Yiming Xue

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are designed to solve complex tasks by generating explicit reasoning traces before producing final answers. However, we reveal a critical vulnerability in LRMs -- termed Unthinking Vulnerability -- wherein the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Zihao Zhu , Hongbao Zhang , Ruotong Wang , Ke Xu , Siwei Lyu , Baoyuan Wu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed code completion tasks, providing context-based suggestions to boost developer productivity in software engineering. As users often fine-tune these models for specific applications, poisoning and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Shenao Yan , Shen Wang , Yue Duan , Hanbin Hong , Kiho Lee , Doowon Kim , Yuan Hong

Backdoor data poisoning, inserted within instruction examples used to fine-tune a foundation Large Language Model (LLM) for downstream tasks (\textit{e.g.,} sentiment prediction), is a serious security concern due to the evasive nature of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Jayaram Raghuram , George Kesidis , David J. Miller

Requiring a large language model (LLM) to generate intermediary reasoning steps, known as Chain of Thought (CoT), has been shown to be an effective way of boosting performance. Previous approaches have focused on generating multiple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Haritz Puerto , Tilek Chubakov , Xiaodan Zhu , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Iryna Gurevych