arXiv Machine Learning

An Empirical Measurement of Jailbreaking Evaluators

The paper evaluates six automated jailbreak evaluators—HarmBench, JailbreakBench, JailbreakRadar, StrongReject, JADES, and JailMeter—using human-labeled data from JailbreakQR and JailMeter-Eva. It measures each evaluator’s agreement with human judgments, error types, and consistency across attack families, controlling for model-specific variation by using a shared LLM judge where needed. The study finds that JADES performs best overall, with HarmBench and StrongReject also showing strong performance.

arXiv AI
Jul 23

JailMeter: An Evidence-Based Evaluation Framework for Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 19424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The assessment of jailbreak attacks against large language models currently suffers from inconsistent evaluation criteria and methods, leading to unreliable estimates of attack success rates.

By Qingjia Huang, Jingyu Zhang, Jianguo Wu, Yakai Li, Weijuan Zhang, Yankai Rong, Junyi Yao, Shengzhi Zhang, Xiaoqi Jia
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

The Fragility of Jailbreak Robustness Across Operational States

The study shows that jailbreak robustness in language models is highly sensitive to operational-state changes. Even minor alterations to system prompts, not intended to affect safety, can dramatically shift attack success rates across seven aligned models and three jailbreak methods. The authors link these variations to changes in hidden representations along a refusal-related axis, which can predict jailbreak outcomes.

By Yuna Park, Hwang Youn Kim, Yujin Kim, Won Woo Ro, Suhyun Kim, Jae-In Hwang
arXiv AI
6d ago

AlcaTRAz - Anchored Tree-Rule Defense Against Jailbreaks

AlcaTRAz is a prompt‑level defense that uses rule trees to insert controlled character‑level perturbations into input text, disrupting jailbreak attacks without modifying or retraining the target LLM. It operates solely on the input, making it suitable for black‑box deployments, and was evaluated on 33 open‑weight models and 22 jailbreak types, outperforming three baseline defenses in 73.4 % of model‑attack combinations. While it significantly reduces high‑severity jailbreak success, it does not eliminate it and is intended as one layer of a broader defense strategy.

By Jakub Re\v{s}, Petr Ka\v{s}ka, Martin Pere\v{s}\'ini, Martin Ukrop, Kamil Malinka
arXiv AI
Aug 5

AI Security Leaderboard: Methodology, Results and Minimal Standard

arXiv:2608. 03070v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier AI model developers increasingly rely on layered safeguards to prevent catastrophic misuse, but little public evidence exists on how much protection these safeguards provide, or how consistently across developers.

By Jasper Timm, Lukas Struppek, Ziwei Xu, Grace Cheong, Oscar Mata, Dan Zhao, Mick Yang, Isadora De Andrade, Xiaojun Jia, Yiming Li, Samuel Bauer, Heather McIntyre, Adam Gleave, Edward Yee, Kellin Pelrine
arXiv AI
Jul 7

SoK: Systematizing LLM Prompt Security: Taxonomies, Datasets, and Unified Evaluation of Attacks and Defenses

arXiv:2510. 15476v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as interfaces to information, code, and real-world services, making prompt-level security failures a practical concern.

By Hanbin Hong, Shuang Wu, Shuya Feng, Nima Naderloui, Shenao Yan, Jingyu Zhang, Ali Arastehfard, Heqing Huang, Yuan Hong
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Jailbreaking in the Haystack

The paper "Jailbreaking in the Haystack" introduces NINJA, a jailbreak technique that exploits long-context language models by appending benign, model-generated content to harmful user goals. It demonstrates that the position of harmful goals within the context is crucial for safety, and shows that NINJA significantly boosts attack success rates on models such as LLaMA, Qwen, Mistral, and Gemini. Unlike previous methods, NINJA is low-resource, transferable, less detectable, and compute‑optimal, revealing that carefully crafted benign long contexts can expose fundamental vulnerabilities in modern LMs.

By Rishi Rajesh Shah, Chen Henry Wu, Shashwat Saxena, Ziqian Zhong, Alexander Robey, Aditi Raghunathan
arXiv AI
Aug 26

ADVERSA: Measuring Multi-Turn Guardrail Degradation and Judge Reliability in Large Language Models

The paper introduces ADVERSA, an automated red‑teaming framework that evaluates large language model safety over multiple turns by tracking continuous compliance trajectories instead of binary jailbreak outcomes. Using a fine‑tuned 70B attacker model and a structured 5‑point rubric, the authors conduct controlled experiments on three frontier victim models, measuring guardrail degradation and judge reliability through a triple‑judge consensus. Results show a 26.7% jailbreak rate with most breaches occurring early, and the study documents inter‑judge agreement, attacker drift, and attacker refusals as key factors affecting safety assessment.

By Harry Owiredu-Ashley
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

A Single Suffix to Break Them All: Basin-Aware Jailbreaks for Merged Model Families

The paper investigates safety risks in model merging, showing that even when all constituent models are individually safety‑aligned, merging can expose a jailbreak vulnerability rooted in the pretrained foundation model. It introduces Basin‑Aware Jailbreak (BAJ), a min–max optimization method that generates adversarial suffixes transferable across merged models sharing the same backbone, without needing the exact merging coefficients or checkpoints. Experiments demonstrate BAJ’s high transfer success rates across diverse backbones and merging settings, and its resilience against existing defenses.

By Yu Zhe, Yixin Tan, Junhao Wei, Wang Chen