arXiv:2509.21843cs.CRcs.CL2025-09被引 10

仅用一次位翻转就能让大模型性能崩溃,且不被发现。

SBFA: Single Sneaky Bit Flip Attack to Break Large Language Models

  • 通过敏感度评分和轻量搜索算法,精准定位致命单比特翻转。
  • 仅一次位翻转即可使多个主流大模型在多项任务上准确率降为随机水平。
  • 攻击隐蔽性强,扰动值保持在正常参数分布范围内,适合安全评估者使用。

大型语言模型(LLMs)的模型完整性已成为部署中的严重安全问题。现有位翻转攻击(BFA)虽可显著损害深度神经网络,但多针对整数或浮点模型分别设计,灵活性受限。尤其在浮点模型中,随机位翻转常导致参数值极端异常(如指数位翻转),引发数值错误(如NaN/Inf),难以隐蔽。本文首次提出SBFA(Sneaky Bit-Flip Attack),仅需一次位翻转,即可使主流大模型性能崩溃,同时确保扰动值处于良性层内权重分布范围内。该方法基于我们提出的影响评分(ImpactScore),结合梯度敏感性与参数扰动范围约束;并设计轻量级SKIP搜索算法,大幅降低搜索复杂度,对最先进模型可在数十分钟内完成攻击搜索。在Qwen、LLaMA和Gemma模型上,无论BF16还是INT8格式,仅一次位翻转即导致MMLU和SST-2任务准确率降至随机水平。这一结果揭示了当前大模型存在严重的安全隐患。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Model integrity of Large language models (LLMs) has become a pressing security concern with their massive online deployment. Prior Bit-Flip Attacks (BFAs) -- a class of popular AI weight memory fault-injection techniques -- can severely compromise Deep Neural Networks (DNNs): as few as tens of bit flips can degrade accuracy toward random guessing. Recent studies extend BFAs to LLMs and reveal that, despite the intuition of better robustness from modularity and redundancy, only a handful of adversarial bit flips can also cause LLMs' catastrophic accuracy degradation. However, existing BFA methods typically focus on either integer or floating-point models separately, limiting attack flexibility. Moreover, in floating-point models, random bit flips often cause perturbed parameters to extreme values (e.g., flipping in exponent bit), making it not stealthy and leading to numerical runtime error (e.g., invalid tensor values (NaN/Inf)). In this work, for the first time, we propose SBFA (Sneaky Bit-Flip Attack), which collapses LLM performance with only one single bit flip while keeping perturbed values within benign layer-wise weight distribution. It is achieved through iterative searching and ranking through our defined parameter sensitivity metric, ImpactScore, which combines gradient sensitivity and perturbation range constrained by the benign layer-wise weight distribution. A novel lightweight SKIP searching algorithm is also proposed to greatly reduce searching complexity, which leads to successful SBFA searching taking only tens of minutes for SOTA LLMs. Across Qwen, LLaMA, and Gemma models, with only one single bit flip, SBFA successfully degrades accuracy to below random levels on MMLU and SST-2 in both BF16 and INT8 data formats. Remarkably, flipping a single bit out of billions of parameters reveals a severe security concern of SOTA LLM models.

大模型安全位翻转攻击模型鲁棒性隐秘攻击

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