arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Groundhog Bit-Flip Attack: Seeding Infinite Generation Loops in Mixture-of-Experts LLMs through Bit Flips

The paper introduces the Groundhog Bit-Flip Attack (GBFA), a novel denial-of-service attack targeting Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) large language models (LLMs). By flipping specific routing-layer bits that activate certain experts, GBFA can cause models to generate excessively long outputs—up to a 5912% increase in token usage—while largely preserving semantic content. The attack requires deactivating fewer than four experts on average across four real-world MoE-based LLMs, exposing a significant robustness vulnerability in these architectures.

By Huakang Lin, Tiancheng Zheng, Mingxuan Sun, Tianhong Xu, Fan Zhang, Yunsi Fei, Ruyi Ding
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Speedbumps: Rejection Attacks on Speculative Decoding

Speedbumps: Rejection Attacks on Speculative Decoding explores how Speculative Rejection Attacks (SRAs) can degrade the efficiency of speculative decoding by causing draft and target models to disagree more often, leading to more target-model forward passes per token. The authors introduce two attacks—Speedbump-P and Speedbump-D—that append adversarial suffixes to attacker-controlled content, optimizing the expected length of the accepted speculative prefix. In some scenarios, these attacks slow inference below autoregressive decoding, reduce output quality, yet remain effective under sampling and transfer across drafters or target models sharing a drafter.

By Adam Y. J. Jones, Yu Yuan, Sergio Maffeis