Semantic-guided Prompt Organization for Universal Goal Hijacking against LLMs

Abstract--With the rising popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs), assessing their trustworthiness through security tasks has gained critical importance. Regarding the new task of universal goal hijacking, previous efforts have concentrated solely on optimization algorithms, overlooking the crucial role of the prompt. To fill this gap, we propose a universal goal hijacking method called POUGH that incorporates semantic-guided prompt processing strategies. Specifically, the method starts with a sampling strategy to select representative prompts from a candidate pool, followed by a ranking strategy that prioritizes the prompts. Once the prompts are organized sequentially, the method employs an iterative optimization algorithm to generate the universal fixed suffix for the prompts. Experiments conducted on four popular LLMs and ten types of target responses verified the effectiveness of our method.