The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in critical domains has
spurred extensive research into their security issues. While input manipulation
attacks (e.g., prompt injection) have been well studied, Bit-Flip Attacks
(BFAs) -- which exploit hardware vulnerabilities to corrupt model parameters
and cause severe performance degradation -- have received far less attention.
Existing BFA methods suffer from key limitations: they fail to balance
performance degradation and output naturalness, making them prone to discovery.
In this paper, we introduce SilentStriker, the first stealthy bit-flip attack
against LLMs that effectively degrades task performance while maintaining
output naturalness. Our core contribution lies in addressing the challenge of
designing effective loss functions for LLMs with variable output length and the
vast output space. Unlike prior approaches that rely on output perplexity for
attack loss formulation, which inevitably degrade output naturalness, we
reformulate the attack objective by leveraging key output tokens as targets for
suppression, enabling effective joint optimization of attack effectiveness and
stealthiness. Additionally, we employ an iterative, progressive search strategy
to maximize attack efficacy. Experiments show that SilentStriker significantly
outperforms existing baselines, achieving successful attacks without
compromising the naturalness of generated text.