SMTrap: Cost-Effective DoS Attacks Against Large Reasoning Models via SMT Conflict Guidance
2608.18921

Authors

Jian Yang,Zhaoyang Yu,Zhaoxin Fan,Kejian Wu,Xiaofeng Wang

Abstract

Existing LRM-DoS methods rely heavily on model feedback to synthesize attack queries, requiring either repeated queries to the target model or training a dedicated attack model. These expensive operations severely weaken attack leverage.

In this paper, we propose search amplification, a novel, model-feedback-free LRM-DoS paradigm. It employs the conflict count derived from an Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver as a low-cost external signal to guide the synthesis of inference-heavy Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) instances.

Our key observation is that LRMs depend on trial-and-backtracking search when solving CSPs, where higher SMT conflict counts on a given CSP instance positively correlate with more extensive LRM backtracking search and substantially longer output trajectories. Building on this finding, we propose \textsc{SMTrap}, a lightweight, CPU-only framework.

Guided by SMT conflict counts, \textsc{SMTrap} generates inference-heavy CSP queries without model queries, attack-model training, or GPU computation. Evaluations across seven frontier models demonstrate the state-of-the-art LRM-DoS capability of \textsc{SMTrap}, producing DoS effects multiple times stronger than existing baselines.

To mitigate the threat of \textsc{SMTrap}, we demonstrate a tool-based mitigation that significantly cuts token usage.

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