大模型加密推理被破解:你的隐私藏在里面
大模型厂商把推理过程加密后发给用户,以为安全。但研究者发现,这些加密块在不同会话、用户甚至模型之间通用——把高级模型的加密推理塞给同厂家的弱模型,弱模型会乖乖解密并原样输出。他们从公开代码仓库里扒出31万多个推理块,解出367条个人信息和182个凭证。更糟的是,即使模型最终拒绝回答危险问题,推理过程里也可能藏着有害信息,攻击者还能把恶意指令藏在加密块里,污染AI代理。这不是你明天能用的漏洞,但它说明:AI的“思考”不是黑盒,而是可以被撬开的保险箱。
📄 原文摘要(英文)
Leading large language model providers now conceal their models' step-by-step reasoning, or chain-of-thought, to protect intellectual property and limit information leakage. Rather than storing these traces server-side, providers return them to the client as blocks of encrypted text, which the client passes back with each subsequent request. Building on prior research, we identify an architectural vulnerability: these encrypted blocks are fully compatible and interchangeable across different sessions, users, and models within a provider's ecosystem. We exploit this compatibility to develop a scalable decryption jailbreak. By injecting an encrypted reasoning trace from a given model into a weaker, and less safeguarded model from the same provider, we force it to decode and output the trace verbatim in plaintext, without ever jailbreaking the more capable model directly. This vulnerability enables four distinct attack vectors. First, it circumvents anti-distillation mechanisms, allowing adversaries to extract a proprietary model's reasoning, as we demonstrate across Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Second, it allows for large-scale private data extraction. Developers frequently share session logs publicly, unaware of contents of the encrypted blocks. By decoding 315,320 reasoning blocks scraped from public repositories, we recovered 367 Personally Identifiable Information (PII) artifacts and 182 credentials. Third, it inadvertently reveals hazardous information hidden within the reasoning process, even in cases where the model's final, visible output safely rejects a malicious request. Fourth, attackers can leverage this flaw to execute invisible prompt injections, embedding malicious payloads entirely within encrypted blocks to poison public agentic rollouts. Following responsible disclosure, we propose concrete cryptographic and system-level mitigations to secure client-side reasoning.