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EchoCoT: Extracting Hidden Chain-of-Thought from Large Reasoning Models (arxiv.org)
1 point by sbulaev 43 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: An attack exploits a gap between tool calls, where a model replays its hidden reasoning, and repeatedly nudges the API to reveal more of it. On open models it recovered nearly word-for-word traces up to 66% of the time, and 80% on new tasks.

Abstract

Hidden chain-of-thought (CoT) traces, especially those from frontier proprietary large reasoning models (LRMs), are valuable model assets. Yet whether these hidden CoTs can be directly extracted from black-box models remains largely unexplored. In this work, we systematically study whether hidden CoTs can be extracted near-verbatim from black-box LRMs through API interactions. We identify a previously overlooked reasoning replay surface between tool calls and develop EchoCoT, a multi-step attack that iteratively extracts hidden CoTs using API-returned fidelity signals. We further develop an LLM-based optimization framework that automatically searches for an effective universal injection trajectory across various datasets. We evaluate EchoCoT on three open-source and five frontier proprietary LRMs. On open-source LRMs, EchoCoT achieves up to 66.4\% near-verbatim extraction success, with the extracted trace length within 10\% of the target and at least 90\% of tokens exactly matching the target CoT. The same injection trajectory also generalizes to unseen datasets, achieving up to 80\% extraction success under the same criterion. For tested frontier proprietary LRMs, a substantial fraction of extracted CoTs closely align with provider-reported reasoning lengths and available CoT summaries. EchoCoT can also extract very long CoTs: on Gemini-2.5, it extracts 33,463 tokens from a 32,948-token target. These results establish hidden-CoT extraction as a practical security risk and highlight the need to better protect hidden CoT assets.

Yiting Qu, Ziqing Yang, Chi Cui, Ye Leng, Junjie Chu, Yang Zhang
arXiv:2608.20055 · cs.CR, cs.AI · submitted Aug 20, 2026
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