{"data":{"id":"a1cf2601-f4d0-4580-9d31-77ad32cdf1f8","title":"ShadowCoT: Cognitive Hijacking for Stealthy Reasoning Backdoors in LLMs","summary":"Researchers present ShadowCoT, a backdoor attack framework that targets the internal chain-of-thought reasoning of LLMs rather than tokens or prompts. By conditioning on internal reasoning states and rewiring attention pathways, updating only 0.15% of parameters, it hijacks multi-step reasoning and produces stealthy adversarial CoTs. Across reasoning benchmarks and LLMs it reports an average Attack Success Rate of 91.2% (peak 94.4%) and a Hijacking Success Rate of 84.9%.","solution":"N/A -- no mitigation discussed in source.","labels":["security","research"],"sourceUrl":"http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11495247","publishedAt":"2026-04-27T13:16:36.000Z","cveId":null,"cweIds":null,"cvssScore":null,"cvssSeverity":null,"severity":"info","attackType":["other"],"issueType":"research","affectedPackages":null,"affectedPackageNames":null,"affectedPackageRefs":null,"affectedVendors":[],"affectedVendorsRaw":[],"classifierModel":"claude-haiku-5-5","classifierPromptVersion":"v4","summaryPromptVersion":"v2","headline":null,"headlinePromptVersion":null,"cvssVector":null,"attackVector":null,"attackComplexity":null,"privilegesRequired":null,"userInteraction":null,"exploitMaturity":null,"epssScore":null,"epssCheckedAt":null,"kevDateAdded":null,"advisoryAliases":null,"affectedPackagesSource":null,"affectedPackagesCheckedAt":null,"patchAvailable":null,"disclosureDate":"2026-04-27T13:16:36.000Z","fixReleasedAt":null,"daysToFix":null,"fixCheckedAt":null,"capecIds":null,"crossRefCount":0,"attackSophistication":"advanced","impactType":["integrity","safety"],"aiComponentTargeted":"model","llmSpecific":true,"classifierConfidence":0.95,"researchCategory":"peer_reviewed","atlasIds":null}}