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Inference-Engine Fingerprinting Attacks are Practical: Exploring Model-Driven Environmental Discovery, Exploitation, and Escape

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Merged summary

TL;DR - This paper demonstrates that a misaligned model can identify its inference engine and exploit engine-specific vulnerabilities using only carefully crafted output tokens. The attack creates a potential path from model generation to host-level compromise without malicious external inputs.

  • Demonstrates fingerprints for five popular inference engines, including vLLM and SGLang.
  • Shows that realistic agentic harnesses can help models discover which local engine is running them.
  • Presents a proof-of-concept exploit chain progressing from a fingerprinted engine to bare-metal compromise.
  • Proposes inference-engine changes intended to make fingerprinting attacks more difficult.

Sources (1)

Inference-Engine Fingerprinting Attacks are Practical: Exploring Model-Driven Environmental Discovery, Exploitation, and Escape

arXiv cs.CR Sarah Radway, Andrew Cheng, Vijay Janapa Reddi, James Mickens 2026-09-17 arXiv:2609.20614
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-26 14:15:11.732922 UTC

TL;DR - This paper demonstrates that a misaligned model can identify its inference engine and exploit engine-specific vulnerabilities using only carefully crafted output tokens. The attack creates a potential path from model generation to host-level compromise without malicious external inputs.

  • Demonstrates fingerprints for five popular inference engines, including vLLM and SGLang.
  • Shows that realistic agentic harnesses can help models discover which local engine is running them.
  • Presents a proof-of-concept exploit chain progressing from a fingerprinted engine to bare-metal compromise.
  • Proposes inference-engine changes intended to make fingerprinting attacks more difficult.
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