Making Them a Malicious Database: Exploiting Query Code to Jailbreak Aligned Large Language Models

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in the field of natural language processing. Unfortunately, LLMs face significant security and ethical risks. Although techniques such as safety alignment are developed for defense, prior researches reveal the possibility of bypassing such defenses through well-designed jailbreak attacks. In this paper, we propose QueryAttack, a novel framework to systematically examine the generalizability of safety alignment. By treating LLMs as knowledge databases, we translate malicious queries in natural language into code-style structured query to bypass the safety alignment mechanisms of LLMs. We conduct extensive experiments on mainstream LLMs, ant the results show that QueryAttack achieves high attack success rates (ASRs) across LLMs with different developers and capabilities. We also evaluate QueryAttack's performance against common defenses, confirming that it is difficult to mitigate with general defensive techniques. To defend against QueryAttack, we tailor a defense method which can reduce ASR by up to 64\% on GPT-4-1106. The code of QueryAttack can be found on https://anonymous.4open.science/r/QueryAttack-334B.