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RECUR: Resource Exhaustion Attack via Recursive-Entropy Guided Counterfactual Utilization and Reflection
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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

Researchers specializing in artificial intelligence security released a technical paper on arXiv on February 13, 2025, detailing a new vulnerability called RECUR (Resource Exhaustion Attack via Recursive-Entropy Guided Counterfactual Utilization and Reflection) that targets Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) to trigger excessive computational costs. By exploiting the self-reflective and iterative nature of high-end AI models, the attack aims to force these systems into infinite or redundant reasoning loops, effectively depleting their token budgets and processing power. This discovery highlights a critical security gap in modern AI architectures where increased cognitive capabilities inadvertently open the door to sophisticated denial-of-service style exploits. The RECUR framework specifically targets the "Chain of Thought" (CoT) and reflection mechanisms that allow models to self-correct during complex problem-solving. Unlike traditional adversarial attacks that focus on generating incorrect outputs or bypassing safety filters, RECUR focuses on economic and operational disruption. By utilizing recursive-entropy guidance, the attack identifies specific triggers that cause the model to reconsider its answers unnecessarily, leading to a massive expansion of context length and a corresponding spike in GPU and memory usage. This research emphasizes that the very features making LRMs powerful—their ability to pause, reflect, and reconsider—are their greatest weaknesses when dealing with counterfactual utilization. As these models become more integrated into commercial APIs and enterprise systems, the financial implications of such resource exhaustion attacks become severe. An attacker could potentially bankrupt a service provider or cause significant latency by sending a small number of specifically crafted queries designed to lock the model in an expensive internal dialogue. The researchers suggest that the industry must move beyond simple input filtering to defend against these sophisticated architectural exploits. Recommendations for mitigation include implementing harder caps on reasoning steps, developing entropy-based detection systems to identify when a model is stuck in a loop, and refining the reflective components of LRMs to better recognize when a conclusion has been reached. This paper serves as a vital warning for developers building on top of reasoning-enhanced LLMs to prioritize operational security alongside model accuracy.

🏷️ 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,...

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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...

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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...

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Chain of thought

Topics referred to by the same term

Chain of thought might refer to:

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🔗 Entity Intersection Graph

Connections for Reasoning model:

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📄 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

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