Chain-of-Lure: A Universal Jailbreak Attack Framework using Unconstrained Synthetic Narratives

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel, unconstrained synthetic narrative-based jailbreak attack framework for large language models, demonstrating high success rates and toxicity, and proposing defense strategies for safer AI development.

Contribution

It introduces a new chain-of-lure attack method using multi-turn narrative optimization, revealing intrinsic vulnerabilities of LLMs and informing future alignment improvements.

Findings

High attack success rates across diverse LLMs

Elevated toxicity scores in generated outputs

Effective defense strategies proposed

Abstract

In the era of rapid generative AI development, interactions with large language models (LLMs) pose increasing risks of misuse. Prior research has primarily focused on attacks using template-based prompts and optimization-oriented methods, while overlooking the fact that LLMs possess strong unconstrained deceptive capabilities to attack other LLMs. This paper introduces a novel jailbreaking method inspired by the Chain-of-Thought mechanism. The attacker employs mission transfer to conceal harmful user intent within dialogue and generates a progressive chain of lure questions without relying on predefined templates, enabling successful jailbreaks. To further improve the attack's strength, we incorporate a helper LLM model that performs randomized narrative optimization over multi-turn interactions, enhancing the attack performance while preserving alignment with the original intent. We also propose a toxicity-based framework using third-party LLMs to evaluate harmful content and its alignment with malicious intent. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently achieves high attack success rates and elevated toxicity scores across diverse types of LLMs under black-box API settings. These findings reveal the intrinsic potential of LLMs to perform unrestricted attacks in the absence of robust alignment constraints. Our approach offers data-driven insights to inform the design of future alignment mechanisms. Finally, we propose two concrete defense strategies to support the development of safer generative models. Our code is available at https://github.com/ChangWenhan/chain-of-lure-official