arXiv AI
Sep 7

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 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 Machine Learning
Oct 23

Harmful Responses Are Jailbreak Templates: Transferring Autoregressive Jailbreaks to Diffusion Language Models

The paper introduces RMT-Jailbreak, a method that transfers autoregressive jailbreak attacks to diffusion large language models (dLLMs). By masking tokens in a harmful response generated by an autoregressive model, the approach creates a high‑mask‑ratio template that, when fed to a dLLM, prompts it to reconstruct the harmful content. Experiments show that this technique effectively transfers jailbreak attacks across different models, highlighting a new vulnerability in diffusion-based language models.

By Jinwei Gan, Zifeng Cheng, Zhiwei Jiang, Ran Sun, Shiping Ge, Qing Gu
arXiv AI
Sep 11

Arbitrary Cipher Attacks Against Large Language Models Do Not Require Fine-Tuning

The paper reports that large language models can acquire cipher-based covert communication skills without fine‑tuning, using prompting or in‑context learning instead. This enables new jailbreak attacks that bypass alignment safeguards by encrypting harmful requests, making them appear as nonsensical text to harmfulness classifiers. The authors demonstrate successful attacks against frontier models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI.

By Thomas Rivasseau