arXiv AI

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.

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 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
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

CASCADE Against Jailbreaks: Combination Across Stages with Controlled Attack-Defense Evaluation

The paper presents a systematic study of combining defenses against jailbreak attacks on Large Language Models across different pipeline stages. It introduces a standardized evaluation framework that defines attack-success-rate, controls query budgets, and applies explicit fairness rules. Across 19 attacks and 15 defenses, the study finds that no single defense dominates, but carefully selected combinations can provide strong safety with minimal loss of utility, offering practical guidance for layered defense pipelines.

By Jiale Luo, Eric Han
arXiv AI
Oct 5

MLCommons Jailbreak Benchmark v1.0

MLCommons Jailbreak Benchmark v1.0 is a new methodology for assessing how well large language models resist single‑turn, text‑based jailbreak attacks. It evaluates eight open‑weight systems with 264 seed prompts across eleven hazard categories, using the AILuminate Assessment Standard v1.4 to measure the Resilience Gap—the difference in safety performance between baseline and adversarial conditions. The benchmark found that unsafe‑response rates rose from 11.08% to 18.65% under jailbreak conditions, yielding an average Resilience Gap of 7.57% and highlighting variability in attack effectiveness and evaluator reliability.

By Carsten Maple (Victor), Cagatay Yucel (Victor), Isaac Holeman (Victor), Chris Knotz (Victor), Peter Mattson (Victor), James Goel (Victor), Jonathan Petit (Victor), Sean McGregor (Victor), James Ezick (Victor), Abhishek Kumar (Victor), Alicia Parrish (Victor), Murali Emani (Victor), Kashyap Iyer (Victor), Faiza Khan Khattak (Victor), Washington Mbonu (Victor), Daniel Machlab (Victor), Eileen Long (Victor), Shaona Ghosh (Victor), Jibin Varghese (Victor), Roman Lutz (Victor), Andrew Gruen (Victor), Bennett Hillenbrand (Victor), Prabal Gupta (Victor), Mohammed Serrhini (Victor), Dhivya Nagasubramanian (Victor), Aakash Gupta (Victor), Jun (Victor), Lu, Kurt Bollacker, Chang Liu, Jonathan Petit, Cong Chen, Jean-Philippe Monteuuis, Brent Miller, Apurv Verma, Roman Eng, Armstrong Foundjem, Mohammed Serrhini
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
Jun 11

JailbreakOPT: Tool-Assisted Iterative Jailbreak Prompt Optimization

arXiv:2606. 11425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jailbreak attacks expose persistent safety weaknesses in large language models (LLMs), but existing stateless single-turn methods face a trade-off: hand-crafted prompts are expressive but static, while iterative prompt optimization can adapt but often relies on low-level mutations that require many target queries.

By Ge Shi, Jun Yin, Donglin Xie, Fangyi Liu, Yucan Li, Menglin Liu
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