SelfDefend: LLMs Can Defend Themselves against Jailbreaking in a Practical Manner

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Xunguang, Wu, Daoyuan, Ji, Zhenlan, Li, Zongjie, Ma, Pingchuan, Wang, Shuai, Li, Yingjiu, Liu, Yang, Liu, Ning, Rahmel, Juergen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Wang, Xunguang
Wu, Daoyuan
Ji, Zhenlan
Li, Zongjie
Ma, Pingchuan
Wang, Shuai
Li, Yingjiu
Liu, Yang
Liu, Ning
Rahmel, Juergen
author_facet Wang, Xunguang
Wu, Daoyuan
Ji, Zhenlan
Li, Zongjie
Ma, Pingchuan
Wang, Shuai
Li, Yingjiu
Liu, Yang
Liu, Ning
Rahmel, Juergen
contents Jailbreaking is an emerging adversarial attack that bypasses the safety alignment deployed in off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs) and has evolved into multiple categories: human-based, optimization-based, generation-based, and the recent indirect and multilingual jailbreaks. However, delivering a practical jailbreak defense is challenging because it needs to not only handle all the above jailbreak attacks but also incur negligible delays to user prompts, as well as be compatible with both open-source and closed-source LLMs. Inspired by how the traditional security concept of shadow stacks defends against memory overflow attacks, this paper introduces a generic LLM jailbreak defense framework called SelfDefend, which establishes a shadow LLM as a defense instance (in detection state) to concurrently protect the target LLM instance (in normal answering state) in the normal stack and collaborate with it for checkpoint-based access control. The effectiveness of SelfDefend builds upon our observation that existing LLMs can identify harmful prompts or intentions in user queries, which we empirically validate using mainstream GPT-3.5/4 models against major jailbreak attacks. To further improve the defense's robustness and minimize costs, we employ a data distillation approach to tune dedicated open-source defense models. When deployed to protect GPT-3.5/4, Claude, Llama-2-7b/13b, and Mistral, these models outperform seven state-of-the-art defenses and match the performance of GPT-4-based SelfDefend, with significantly lower extra delays. Further experiments show that the tuned models are robust to adaptive jailbreaks and prompt injections.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_05498
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SelfDefend: LLMs Can Defend Themselves against Jailbreaking in a Practical Manner
Wang, Xunguang
Wu, Daoyuan
Ji, Zhenlan
Li, Zongjie
Ma, Pingchuan
Wang, Shuai
Li, Yingjiu
Liu, Yang
Liu, Ning
Rahmel, Juergen
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Jailbreaking is an emerging adversarial attack that bypasses the safety alignment deployed in off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs) and has evolved into multiple categories: human-based, optimization-based, generation-based, and the recent indirect and multilingual jailbreaks. However, delivering a practical jailbreak defense is challenging because it needs to not only handle all the above jailbreak attacks but also incur negligible delays to user prompts, as well as be compatible with both open-source and closed-source LLMs. Inspired by how the traditional security concept of shadow stacks defends against memory overflow attacks, this paper introduces a generic LLM jailbreak defense framework called SelfDefend, which establishes a shadow LLM as a defense instance (in detection state) to concurrently protect the target LLM instance (in normal answering state) in the normal stack and collaborate with it for checkpoint-based access control. The effectiveness of SelfDefend builds upon our observation that existing LLMs can identify harmful prompts or intentions in user queries, which we empirically validate using mainstream GPT-3.5/4 models against major jailbreak attacks. To further improve the defense's robustness and minimize costs, we employ a data distillation approach to tune dedicated open-source defense models. When deployed to protect GPT-3.5/4, Claude, Llama-2-7b/13b, and Mistral, these models outperform seven state-of-the-art defenses and match the performance of GPT-4-based SelfDefend, with significantly lower extra delays. Further experiments show that the tuned models are robust to adaptive jailbreaks and prompt injections.
title SelfDefend: LLMs Can Defend Themselves against Jailbreaking in a Practical Manner
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05498