cs.CRAug 24, 2026

Adversarial Entropy Inflation Against Gumbel-Based Inference Verification

Authors: Nikita Kezins

Organizations: Delft University of Technology

Abstract

Gumbel-based inference verification bounds LLM weight exfiltration by only forgiving token choices that plausibly arise from honest GPU nondeterminism, reporting a >200x slowdown for a steganographic adversary under benign prompt traffic. This bound assumes a passive attacker; we show it degrades sharply against an adversary who instead controls the prompt distribution. Because the verifier's admissible-token-set size is driven by the model's own output entropy, prompts engineered to break grammatical and sub-word structure -- rather than benign conversational traffic -- widen that set and open a materially larger covert channel. Across six instruction-tuned models spanning 1B to 32B parameters and three random seeds, our strongest attack (character- and script-level disruption) roughly doubles bits leaked per token relative to benign prompts, cutting the slowdown factor to 60x - 118x. These results indicate that static, benign-traffic-calibrated thresholds are insufficient for this defense, and that jitter-forgiveness thresholds should instead be calibrated dynamically against local token entropy.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. TensorCommitments: A Lightweight Verifiable Inference for Large Language Models

    Feb 13, 2026Oguzhan Baser, Elahe Sadeghi, Eric Wang +5LLM InferenceLLM Security

  2. Privacy-Preserving Mechanisms Enable Cheap Verifiable Inference of LLMs

    Feb 19, 2026Arka Pal, Louai Zahran, William Gvozdjak +2Verifiable Outsourced ComputationLLM Inference

  3. Steering Vectors are an Adversarial Attack Surface

    Jun 4, 2026Abzal Aidakhmetov, Donato Crisostomi, Tommaso Mencattini +3Language Model SteeringAdversarial Attacks on LLMs