Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) extend large language models (LLMs)
to process multi-modal information, enabling them to generate responses to
image-text inputs. MLLMs have been incorporated into diverse multi-modal
applications, such as autonomous driving and medical diagnosis, via
plug-and-play without fine-tuning. This deployment paradigm increases the
vulnerability of MLLMs to backdoor attacks. However, existing backdoor attacks
against MLLMs achieve limited effectiveness and stealthiness. In this work, we
propose BadToken, the first token-level backdoor attack to MLLMs. BadToken
introduces two novel backdoor behaviors: Token-substitution and Token-addition,
which enable flexible and stealthy attacks by making token-level modifications
to the original output for backdoored inputs. We formulate a general
optimization problem that considers the two backdoor behaviors to maximize the
attack effectiveness. We evaluate BadToken on two open-source MLLMs and various
tasks. Our results show that our attack maintains the model's utility while
achieving high attack success rates and stealthiness. We also show the
real-world threats of BadToken in two scenarios, i.e., autonomous driving and
medical diagnosis. Furthermore, we consider defenses including fine-tuning and
input purification. Our results highlight the threat of our attack.