Rewrite to Jailbreak: Discover Learnable and Transferable Implicit Harmfulness Instruction

TL;DR

This paper introduces R2J, a learnable and transferable method for creating effective LLM jailbreaks by rewriting instructions, improving attack efficiency and transferability without explicit patterns, thus highlighting safety concerns.

Contribution

Proposes R2J, a novel black-box jailbreak approach that automatically rewrites instructions to attack LLMs, demonstrating improved efficiency and transferability over existing methods.

Findings

R2J effectively exploits LLM weaknesses with few queries.

Jailbreaks are transferable across datasets and models.

Rewriting instructions is a learnable, transferable attack strategy.

Abstract

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely applied in various domains, the safety of LLMs is increasingly attracting attention to avoid their powerful capabilities being misused. Existing jailbreak methods create a forced instruction-following scenario, or search adversarial prompts with prefix or suffix tokens to achieve a specific representation manually or automatically. However, they suffer from low efficiency and explicit jailbreak patterns, far from the real deployment of mass attacks to LLMs. In this paper, we point out that simply rewriting the original instruction can achieve a jailbreak, and we find that this rewriting approach is learnable and transferable. We propose the Rewrite to Jailbreak (R2J) approach, a transferable black-box jailbreak method to attack LLMs by iteratively exploring the weakness of the LLMs and automatically improving the attacking strategy. The jailbreak is more efficient and hard to identify since no additional features are introduced. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of R2J, and we find that the jailbreak is also transferable to multiple datasets and various types of models with only a few queries. We hope our work motivates further investigation of LLM safety. The code can be found at https://github.com/ythuang02/R2J/.