HijackKV: New Threat in Position-Independent KV Cache Reuse
Key-Value (KV) cache reduces inference latency in large language models (LLMs). Traditional prefix-based reuse has low cache hit rates across inference requests because it requires exact token and position matches. To improve efficiency, recent system optimizations introduce position-independent KV reuse, allowing KV cache to be reused whenever identical text chunks appear, regardless of their position in the sequence. We show this design introduces a new threat, KV Cache Hijacking. Since KV caches are retrieved by token match but encode the context in which they were originally computed, the KV tied to a benign-looking token chunk may encode an attacker-controlled prefix. When later reus...
| Authors | Yichi Zhang, Zhiqi Wang, Huan Zhang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 22 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 July 2026 |
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