Inhibitory Attacks on Backdoor-based Fingerprinting for Large Language Models

Hang fu, Wanli Peng, Yinghan Zhou, Jiaxuan Wu, Juan Wen, Xue Yiming


Abstract
The widespread adoption of Large Language Model (LLM) in commercial and research settings has intensified the need for robust intellectual property protection. Backdoor-based LLM fingerprinting has emerged as a promising solution for this challenge. In practical application, the low-cost multi-model collaborative technique, LLM ensemble, combines diverse LLMs to leverage their complementary strengths, garnering significant attention and practical adoption. Unfortunately, the vulnerability of existing LLM fingerprinting for the ensemble scenario is unexplored. In order to comprehensively assess the robustness of LLM fingerprinting, in this paper, we propose two novel fingerprinting attack methods: token filter attack (TFA) and sentence verification attack (SVA). The TFA gets the next token from a unified set of tokens created by the token filter mechanism at each decoding step. The SVA filters out fingerprint responses through a sentence verification mechanism based on perplexity and voting. Experimentally, the proposed methods effectively inhibit the fingerprint response while maintaining ensemble performance. Compared with state-of-the-art attack methods, the proposed method can achieve better performance. The findings necessitate enhanced robustness in LLM fingerprinting.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1207
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
26246–26266
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1207/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hang fu, Wanli Peng, Yinghan Zhou, Jiaxuan Wu, Juan Wen, and Xue Yiming. 2026. Inhibitory Attacks on Backdoor-based Fingerprinting for Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 26246–26266, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Inhibitory Attacks on Backdoor-based Fingerprinting for Large Language Models (fu et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1207.pdf
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