LLM防护机制反被利用,攻击者可让其陷入无限推理,导致系统瘫痪。
From Shield to Target: Denial-of-Service Attacks on LLM-Based Agent Guardrails

- 用优化语言输入诱导防护模块进入无限推理循环
- 攻击在多种模型上实现13至63倍的令牌量放大
- 真实系统中可引发高达148倍延迟,危及整个服务
基于大模型的防护机制已成为应对自主代理中提示注入和越狱攻击的有效防御手段。然而,我们揭示其推理与任务执行能力反而引入了新漏洞:攻击者可通过精心构造的数据使防护模块陷入持续推理循环,从而实施系统性拒绝服务(DoS)攻击。为系统揭示该威胁,我们设计了一种基于束搜索优化的框架,利用由策略库指导的LLM生成器,最大化防护模块的推理长度;同时,基于防护机制遵循模板的特性,提出一种计算开销更低的、基于机制感知结构变异的攻击框架。攻击效果在两方面系统评估:首先,在独立测试中,攻击在不同防护架构、安全模板和代理基准上均具泛化能力,单一开源替代模型优化的输入可成功迁移至八种主流模型(如Claude、GPT、Gemini、DeepSeek、Qwen等),实现13–63×的令牌量放大;其次,在端到端真实部署场景(网页、桌面、代码及多智能体系统)中,攻击导致最高达148×的延迟放大。我们证实,一个被污染的文档即可耗尽共享防护基础设施,致使共置代理资源枯竭,整体系统瘫痪。本工作揭示了可用性缺陷,凸显亟需开发成本可控、推理鲁棒的防护机制。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
LLM-based guardrails have emerged as a highly effective defense against prompt injection and jailbreak attacks in autonomous agents. However, we reveal that the very reasoning and task-following capabilities enabling this protection introduce a novel vulnerability: attackers can inject crafted data to trap the guardrail in extended reasoning loops, effectuating a systematic denial-of-service (DoS) attack. To systematically expose this threat, we design a beam-search optimization framework that crafts natural-language payloads to maximize guardrail reasoning length, utilizing an LLM proposer guided by a strategy bank. Based on the observation of guardrail's schema-following nature, we also provide another attack framework driven by mechanism-aware structural mutations with less computational load. The attack efficacy is systematically evaluated in two parts. First, in standalone evaluations, the attack generalizes across diverse guardrail architectures, safety templates, and agent benchmarks. Payloads optimized on a single open-source surrogate successfully transfer to eight leading model backbones (e.g., Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Qwen), achieving a 13--63$\times$ token amplification. Second, in end-to-end real-world agent deployments (web, desktop, code, and multi-agent systems), the attack reveals up to a 148$\times$ latency amplification. We show that a single poisoned document can saturate shared guardrail infrastructures, effectively starving co-located agents and paralyzing the entire system. By uncovering this availability flaw, our work underscores the urgent need to develop cost-bounded, reasoning-robust guardrails.
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