HijackKV: New Threat in Position-Independent KV Cache Reuse

Abstract

Key-Value (KV) cache reduces inference latency in large language models (LLMs). Traditional prefix-based reuse has low cache hit rates across inference requests because it requires exact token and position matches. To improve efficiency, recent system optimizations introduce position-independent KV reuse, allowing KV cache to be reused whenever identical text chunks appear, regardless of their position in the sequence. We show this design introduces a new threat, KV Cache Hijacking. Since KV caches are retrieved by token match but encode the context in which they were originally computed, the KV tied to a benign-looking token chunk may encode an attacker-controlled prefix. When later reused in a victim query, this contaminated KV silently hijacks the model's behavior, even if no attacker-controlled text appears in the input. We introduce HIJACKKV, the first attack framework that systematically exploits this vulnerability, demonstrating its severity and practicality. HIJACKKV optimizes an attacker-controlled prefix, so that the KV computed for a subsequent common benign text encodes the attacker's goal, while the text remains unchanged for future cache hits. HIJACKKV achieves an average 94% success rate in a single attempt, remains effective under realistic constraints including low hit rates (10%) and frequent recomputation (50%), persists over multi-turn interactions, and transfers across models in black-box settings. We further provide design insights for building secure KV reuse systems.