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Abstract
The widespread distribution of Large Language Models (LLMs) through public
platforms like Hugging Face introduces significant security challenges. While
these platforms perform basic security scans, they often fail to detect subtle
manipulations within the embedding layer. This work identifies a novel class of
deployment phase attacks that exploit this vulnerability by injecting
imperceptible perturbations directly into the embedding layer outputs without
modifying model weights or input text. These perturbations, though
statistically benign, systematically bypass safety alignment mechanisms and
induce harmful behaviors during inference. We propose Search based Embedding
Poisoning(SEP), a practical, model agnostic framework that introduces carefully
optimized perturbations into embeddings associated with high risk tokens. SEP
leverages a predictable linear transition in model responses, from refusal to
harmful output to semantic deviation to identify a narrow perturbation window
that evades alignment safeguards. Evaluated across six aligned LLMs, SEP
achieves an average attack success rate of 96.43% while preserving benign task
performance and evading conventional detection mechanisms. Our findings reveal
a critical oversight in deployment security and emphasize the urgent need for
embedding level integrity checks in future LLM defense strategies.