RECUR: Resource Exhaustion Attack via Recursive-Entropy Guided Counterfactual Utilization and Reflection
#RECUR attack #Large Reasoning Models #Resource exhaustion #Adversarial AI #Chain of Thought #arXiv #Recursive entropy
📌 Key Takeaways
- The RECUR attack exploits the self-reflection mechanism in Large Reasoning Models to cause excessive resource consumption.
- Researchers found that recursive-entropy guidance can force AI models into infinite reasoning loops.
- This vulnerability poses a significant financial and operational risk to companies providing AI services via APIs.
- Standard security protocols focus on content safety, but RECUR highlights the need for computational security in AI.
📖 Full Retelling
🏷️ Themes
Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence, Resource Management
📚 Related People & Topics
Reasoning model
Language models designed for reasoning tasks
A reasoning model, also known as reasoning language models (RLMs) or large reasoning models (LRMs), is a type of large language model (LLM) that has been specifically trained to solve complex tasks requiring multiple steps of logical reasoning. These models demonstrate superior performance on logic,...
Resource exhaustion attack
Resource exhaustion attacks are computer security exploits that crash, hang, or otherwise interfere with the targeted program or system. They are a form of denial-of-service attack but are different from distributed denial-of-service attacks, which involve overwhelming a network host such as a web s...
Adversarial machine learning
Research field that lies at the intersection of machine learning and computer security
Adversarial machine learning is the study of the attacks on machine learning algorithms, and of the defenses against such attacks. Machine learning techniques are mostly designed to work on specific problem sets, under the assumption that the training and test data are generated from the same statis...
🔗 Entity Intersection Graph
Connections for Reasoning model:
- 🌐 Reinforcement learning (3 shared articles)
- 🌐 LRM (1 shared articles)
- 🌐 Chain of thought (1 shared articles)
- 🌐 Vector field (1 shared articles)
- 🌐 Large language model (1 shared articles)
- 🌐 Artificial intelligence (1 shared articles)
- 🌐 Machine learning (1 shared articles)
📄 Original Source Content
arXiv:2602.08214v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) employ reasoning to address complex tasks. Such explicit reasoning requires extended context lengths, resulting in substantially higher resource consumption. Prior work has shown that adversarially crafted inputs can trigger redundant reasoning processes, exposing LRMs to resource-exhaustion vulnerabilities. However, the reasoning process itself, especially its reflective component, has received limited attention, eve