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arXiv · 2510.17098

Can Transformer Memory Be Corrupted? Investigating Cache-Side Vulnerabilities in Large Language Models

Elias Hossain·Swayamjit Saha·Somshubhra Roy·Ravi Prasad
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Abstract

Even when prompts and parameters are secured, transformer language models remain vulnerable because their key-value (KV) cache during inference constitutes an overlooked attack surface. This paper introduces Malicious Token Injection (MTI), a modular framework that systematically perturbs cached key vectors at selected layers and timesteps through controlled magnitude and frequency, using additive Gaussian noise, zeroing, and orthogonal rotations. A theoretical analysis quantifies how these perturbations propagate through attention, linking logit deviations to the Frobenius norm of corruption and softmax Lipschitz dynamics. Empirical results show that MTI significantly alters next-token distributions and downstream task performance across GPT-2 and LLaMA-2/7B, as well as destabilizes retrieval-augmented and agentic reasoning pipelines. These findings identify cache integrity as a critical yet underexplored vulnerability in current LLM deployments, positioning cache corruption as a reproducible and theoretically grounded threat model for future robustness and security research.

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Elias Hossain, Swayamjit Saha, Somshubhra Roy, Ravi Prasad. 2025-10-20. Can Transformer Memory Be Corrupted? Investigating Cache-Side Vulnerabilities in Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17098

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