Rerouting LLM Routers

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Shafran, Avital, Schuster, Roei, Ristenpart, Thomas, Shmatikov, Vitaly
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Shafran, Avital
Schuster, Roei
Ristenpart, Thomas
Shmatikov, Vitaly
author_facet Shafran, Avital
Schuster, Roei
Ristenpart, Thomas
Shmatikov, Vitaly
contents LLM routers aim to balance quality and cost of generation by classifying queries and routing them to a cheaper or more expensive LLM depending on their complexity. Routers represent one type of what we call LLM control planes: systems that orchestrate use of one or more LLMs. In this paper, we investigate routers' adversarial robustness. We first define LLM control plane integrity, i.e., robustness of LLM orchestration to adversarial inputs, as a distinct problem in AI safety. Next, we demonstrate that an adversary can generate query-independent token sequences we call ``confounder gadgets'' that, when added to any query, cause LLM routers to send the query to a strong LLM. Our quantitative evaluation shows that this attack is successful both in white-box and black-box settings against a variety of open-source and commercial routers, and that confounding queries do not affect the quality of LLM responses. Finally, we demonstrate that gadgets can be effective while maintaining low perplexity, thus perplexity-based filtering is not an effective defense. We finish by investigating alternative defenses.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_01818
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rerouting LLM Routers
Shafran, Avital
Schuster, Roei
Ristenpart, Thomas
Shmatikov, Vitaly
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
LLM routers aim to balance quality and cost of generation by classifying queries and routing them to a cheaper or more expensive LLM depending on their complexity. Routers represent one type of what we call LLM control planes: systems that orchestrate use of one or more LLMs. In this paper, we investigate routers' adversarial robustness. We first define LLM control plane integrity, i.e., robustness of LLM orchestration to adversarial inputs, as a distinct problem in AI safety. Next, we demonstrate that an adversary can generate query-independent token sequences we call ``confounder gadgets'' that, when added to any query, cause LLM routers to send the query to a strong LLM. Our quantitative evaluation shows that this attack is successful both in white-box and black-box settings against a variety of open-source and commercial routers, and that confounding queries do not affect the quality of LLM responses. Finally, we demonstrate that gadgets can be effective while maintaining low perplexity, thus perplexity-based filtering is not an effective defense. We finish by investigating alternative defenses.
title Rerouting LLM Routers
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01818