Adversarial Entropy Inflation Against Gumbel-Based Inference Verification
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
| Bits Extracted per Token ( ) | Slowdown Multiplier ( ) | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Benign | TERSE | SCRAMBLE | CIPHER | Benign | TERSE | SCRAMBLE | CIPHER |
| 1B | 0.085 0.007 | 0.073 0.004 | 0.132 0.009 | 0.160 0.007 | 201 17 | 232 12 | 129 9 | 106 5 |
| 3B | 0.067 0.006 | 0.048 0.002 | 0.103 0.007 | 0.146 0.011 | 254 22 | 352 10 | 166 11 | 117 8 |
| 8B | 0.068 0.002 | 0.058 0.011 | 0.112 0.010 | 0.183 0.011 | 252 7 | 304 68 | 153 14 | 93 6 |
| 14B | 0.093 0.002 | 0.103 0.007 | 0.167 0.012 | 0.167 0.016 | 186 4 | 168 11 | 103 7 | 104 9 |
| 30B-MoE | 0.119 0.011 | 0.145 0.011 | 0.258 0.015 | 0.286 0.013 | 146 15 | 120 9 | 67 4 | 60 3 |
Adversarial Attacks on LLMs
Adversarial attacks on large language models probe how crafted inputs, internal changes, and agent interactions bypass safety or disrupt reliable behavior.
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