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Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed, but their growing compute
demands expose them to inference cost attacks that maximize output length. We
reveal that prior attacks are fundamentally self-targeting because they rely on
crafted inputs, so the added cost accrues to the attacker's own queries and
scales poorly in practice. In this work, we introduce the first bit-flip
inference cost attack that directly modifies model weights to induce persistent
overhead for all users of a compromised LLM. Such attacks are stealthy yet
realistic in practice: for instance, in shared MLaaS environments, co-located
tenants can exploit hardware-level faults (e.g., Rowhammer) to flip memory bits
storing model parameters. We instantiate this attack paradigm with BitHydra,
which (1) minimizes a loss that suppresses the end-of-sequence token (i.e.,
EOS) and (2) employs an efficient yet effective critical-bit search focused on
the EOS embedding vector, sharply reducing the search space while preserving
benign-looking outputs. We evaluate across 11 LLMs (1.5B-14B) under int8 and
float16, demonstrating that our method efficiently achieves scalable cost
inflation with only a few bit flips, while remaining effective even against
potential defenses.