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Research PaperResearchia:202605.16007

Talk is (Not) Cheap: A Taxonomy and Benchmark Coverage Audit for LLM Attacks

Karthik Raghu Iyer

Abstract

We introduce a reusable framework for auditing whether LLM attack benchmarks collectively cover the threat surface: a 4$\times$6 Target $\times$ Technique matrix grounded in STRIDE, constructed from a 507-leaf taxonomy -- 401 data-populated and 106 threat-model-derived leaves -- of inference-time attacks extracted from 932 arXiv security studies (2023--2026). The matrix enables benchmark-external validation -- auditing collective coverage rather than individual benchmark consistency. Applying it...

Submitted: May 16, 2026Subjects: Cybersecurity; Computer Science

Description / Details

We introduce a reusable framework for auditing whether LLM attack benchmarks collectively cover the threat surface: a 4×\times6 Target ×\times Technique matrix grounded in STRIDE, constructed from a 507-leaf taxonomy -- 401 data-populated and 106 threat-model-derived leaves -- of inference-time attacks extracted from 932 arXiv security studies (2023--2026). The matrix enables benchmark-external validation -- auditing collective coverage rather than individual benchmark consistency. Applying it to six public benchmarks reveals that the three primary frameworks (HarmBench, InjecAgent, AgentDojo) occupy non-overlapping cells covering at most 25% of the matrix, while entire STRIDE threat categories (Service Disruption, Model Internals) lack any standardized evaluation, despite published attacks in these categories achieving 46×\times token amplification and 96% attack success rates through mechanisms which no benchmark tests. The corpus of 2,521 unique attack groups further reveals pervasive naming fragmentation (up to 29 surface forms for a single attack) and heavy concentration in Safety & Alignment Bypass, structural properties invisible at smaller scale. The taxonomy, attack records, and coverage mappings are released as extensible artifacts; as new benchmarks emerge, they can be mapped onto the same matrix, enabling the community to track whether evaluation gaps are closing.


Source: arXiv:2605.15118v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15118v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.15118v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15118v1

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Date:
May 16, 2026
Topic:
Computer Science
Area:
Cybersecurity
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