The Philosopher's Stone: Trojaning Plugins of Large Language Models
Date: 2023-11
Affected: LoRA/PEFT adapters on HuggingFace, open-source LLMs
Attack vector: backdoor
Category: research
Severity: High

Dong et al. show that LoRA / low-rank adapters can be trojaned via the POLISHED and FUSION attacks. An infected adapter triggers attacker-defined outputs or malicious tool invocations when published on adapter hubs.


Mitigations:

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):