Rethinking Latency Denial-of-Service: Attacking the LLM Serving Framework, Not the Model

arXiv:2602.07878v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM inference is inherently expensive, even a modest slowdown can translate into substantial operating costs and severe availability risks. Recently, a growing body of research known as latency attacks focuses on crafting inputs to trigger worst-case output lengths. However, we report a contrary finding that these algorithmic-level latency attacks are largely ineffective against modern LLM serving systems. We reveal that system-level optimization such as continuous batching provides a logical isolation to mitigate contagious latency impact on co-located users. Thus, in this paper, we shift our focus from the algorithm to the system layer, and introduce a new Fill and Squeeze attack strategy targeting the state transition of the scheduler. ``Fill'' first exhausts the global KV cache to induce Head-of-Line blocking, while ``Squeeze'' forces the system into repetitive preemption. By manipulating output lengths using different attack prompts, and leveraging side-channel probing of memory status, we demonstrate that the attack can succeed in a practical black-box setting with much less cost. Extensive evaluations on vLLM indicate up to $75-742\times$ TTFT degradation relative to benign baselines and $1.5-4\times$ average slowdown on Time Per Output Token compared to existing attacks with 30-40% lower attack cost. Code: https://github.com/Phil-Fan/FS-attack

Abstract:LLM inference is inherently expensive, even a modest slowdown can translate into substantial operating costs and severe availability risks. Recently, a growing body of research known as latency attacks focuses on crafting inputs to trigger worst-case output lengths. However, we report a contrary finding that these algorithmic-level latency attacks are largely ineffective against modern LLM serving systems. We reveal that system-level optimization such as continuous batching provides a logical isolation to mitigate contagious latency impact on co-located users. Thus, in this paper, we shift our focus from the algorithm to the system layer, and introduce a new Fill and Squeeze attack strategy targeting the state transition of the scheduler. ``Fill'' first exhausts the global KV cache to induce Head-of-Line blocking, while ``Squeeze'' forces the system into repetitive preemption. By manipulating output lengths using different attack prompts, and leveraging side-channel probing of memory status, we demonstrate that the attack can succeed in a practical black-box setting with much less cost. Extensive evaluations on vLLM indicate up to $75-742\times$ TTFT degradation relative to benign baselines and $1.5-4\times$ average slowdown on Time Per Output Token compared to existing attacks with 30-40% lower attack cost. Code: this https URL

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2602.07878 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2602.07878v2 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.07878 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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Rethinking Latency Denial-of-Service: Attacking the LLM Serving Framework, Not the Model

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