AttacksarXiv 2610.12644
Cancerous backdoor attack: progressive activation via invisible tokens and a stage controller.
Proposes the Cancerous backdoor, which progressively corrupts reasoning using invisible stage tokens.
- arXiv
- 2610.12644
- Published
- Setting
- Models and APIs
- Evaluated models
- Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3
- AttacksPoisoning and backdoors
- TechniqueDormant triggers
- ComponentReasoning chains
AbstractHidden tokens plus a stage controller make the backdoor progressively corrupt reasoning upon triggering, and the authors believe that looking only at the answer will miss it.
Cancerous Backdoor Attack changes LLM backdoors from one-time activation to multi-stage reasoning corruption that accumulates progressively with triggers.