01 — attack families

TAP

Also written Tree of Attacks with Pruning

persuasion

A tree search on top of PAIR. The attacker branches into several candidate refinements at each step instead of one, then prunes the branches an evaluator judges off-topic or unpromising before spending queries on them. The pruning is what makes it efficient: far fewer target queries for a higher success rate. It is the strongest of the black-box persuasion families in the taxonomy.

See also PAIR · PAP

Related terms

  • PAIR Attack families

    An attacker model and a target model in a loop: the attacker proposes a prompt, sees how the target responded, and rewrites the prompt to do better …

  • PAP Attack families

    PAP applies the taxonomy of human persuasion — authority, reciprocity, social proof, emotional appeal, expert framing, logical appeal — to the harmful…

Attack families

The ten families in the HackAgent attack taxonomy (AISecurityLab/hackagent ↗), which is the taxonomy MoorAI's red-team corpora are keyed to. They are not ten unrelated tricks — they cluster into two groups that behave very differently. Obfuscation families hide the payload so the model never recognises it as harmful. Persuasion families state the harmful request plainly and argue the model into it. That split matters, because a model that refuses persuasion outright will happily comply with an encoding it cannot decode — see marginal value.

TAP is term 10 of 10 in this part of the glossary.

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This page is one entry from the agentic AI security glossary, which defines 60 terms in the same style. Where a term belongs to a published taxonomy or standard — the HackAgent attack families, the OWASP lists, AMTSO's guidelines, MITRE ATLAS, ISO/IEC 42001, the NIST AI RMF, the EU AI Act — the authoritative wording is the source document's, not ours, and specifics should be verified there. "Lethal trifecta" is Simon Willison's term. OWASP® is a trademark of the OWASP Foundation; ATT&CK® and ATLAS™ are trademarks of The MITRE Corporation. Naming a framework here is description, not a claim of certification or endorsement.

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