jailbreak
Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automatically
While Large Language Models (LLMs) display versatile functionality, they continue to generate harmful, biased, and toxic content, as demonstrated by the prevalence of human-designed . In this work, we present (TAP), an automated method for generating jailbreaks that only requires black-box access to the target LLM. TAP utilizes an attacker LLM to iteratively refine candidate (attack) prompts until one of the refined prompts jailbreaks the target. In addition, before sending prompts to the target, TAP assesses them and prunes the ones unlikely to result in jailbreaks, reducing the number of queries sent to the target LLM. In empirical evaluations, we observe that TAP generates prompts that jailbreak state-of-the-art LLMs (including GPT4-Turbo and GPT4o) for more than 80% of the prompts. This significantly improves upon the previous state-of-the-art black-box methods for generating jailbreaks while using a smaller number of queries than them. Furthermore, TAP is also capable of jailbreaking LLMs protected by state-of-the-art, e.g., LlamaGuard.
Robust Prompt Optimization for Defending Language Models Against Jailbreaking Attacks
Despite advances in AI alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks or jailbreaking, in which adversaries can modify prompts to induce unwanted behavior. While some defenses have been proposed, they have not been adapted to newly proposed attacks and more challenging threat models. To address this, we propose an optimization-based objective for defending LLMs against jailbreaking attacks and an algorithm, Robust Prompt Optimization (RPO), to create robust system-level defenses. Our approach directly incorporates the adversary into the defensive objective and optimizes a lightweight and transferable suffix, enabling RPO to adapt to worst-case adaptive attacks. Our theoretical and experimental results show improved robustness to both jailbreaks seen during optimization and unknown jailbreaks, reducing the attack success rate (ASR) on GPT-4 to 6% and Llama-2 to 0% on JailbreakBench, setting the state-of-the-art.