Hidden Risks of Jev: An Empirical Study of Security, Privacy, and Dual Use

Abstract

Jev turns natural-language questions into typed answers and probabilities with low latency and cost, enabling applications to route requests and select tools. While this interface allows Jev to integrate naturally into application workflows as a decision layer, the security and privacy implications of this emerging use remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, we conduct the first systematic study of these implications using the official Jev API and NanoJev, a local model with controllable training data and updates, focusing on three research questions: (1) What security threats arise when Jev is deployed as an application decision layer? (2) What private information can Jev reveal despite returning constrained typed outputs? (3) How can Jev's general-purpose decision capability be used for beneficial purposes or misused? Jev's decisions depend on application state and may be influenced by user-provided inputs. We therefore adapt prompt injection and adversarial suffixes to manipulate its decisions. Open-source Jev distribution and updates introduce supply-chain risks, which we examine by implanting backdoors in NanoJev through training data poisoning. Since Jev's outputs reflect both application state and information learned during training, we further adapt membership, private attribute, and internal knowledge inference attacks to recover sensitive information despite its constrained output format. Finally, Jev can serve as a general-purpose decision oracle for defensive and malicious workflows. We examine this dual use through four detection tasks covering prompt injection, jailbreak inputs, harmful content, and AI-generated text, alongside misuse scenarios involving jailbreak and model extraction. Our empirical evaluation shows that Jev remains vulnerable to the examined security and privacy threats, while its decision capability can support beneficial and malicious uses.