Semantic Denial of Service in LLM-controlled robots
Safety-oriented instruction-following is supposed to keep LLM-controlled robots safe. We show it also creates an availability attack surface. By injecting short safety-plausible phrases (1-5 tokens) into a robots audio channel, an adversary can trigger the models safety reasoning to halt or disrupt execution without jailbreaking the model or overriding its policy. In the embodied setting, this is a semantic denial-of-service attack: the agent stops because the injected signal looks like a legitimate alert. Across four vision-language models, seven prompt-level defenses, three deployment modes, and single- and multi-injection settings, we find that prompt-only defenses trade off attack sup...
| Authors | Jonathan Steinberg, Oren Gal |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 25 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 25 April 2026 |
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