The VLLM Safety Paradox: Dual Ease in Jailbreak Attack and Defense

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Guo, Yangyang, Jiao, Fangkai, Nie, Liqiang, Kankanhalli, Mohan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Guo, Yangyang
Jiao, Fangkai
Nie, Liqiang
Kankanhalli, Mohan
author_facet Guo, Yangyang
Jiao, Fangkai
Nie, Liqiang
Kankanhalli, Mohan
contents The vulnerability of Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) to jailbreak attacks appears as no surprise. However, recent defense mechanisms against these attacks have reached near-saturation performance on benchmark evaluations, often with minimal effort. This \emph{dual high performance} in both attack and defense raises a fundamental and perplexing paradox. To gain a deep understanding of this issue and thus further help strengthen the trustworthiness of VLLMs, this paper makes three key contributions: i) One tentative explanation for VLLMs being prone to jailbreak attacks--\textbf{inclusion of vision inputs}, as well as its in-depth analysis. ii) The recognition of a largely ignored problem in existing defense mechanisms--\textbf{over-prudence}. The problem causes these defense methods to exhibit unintended abstention, even in the presence of benign inputs, thereby undermining their reliability in faithfully defending against attacks. iii) A simple safety-aware method--\textbf{LLM-Pipeline}. Our method repurposes the more advanced guardrails of LLMs on the shelf, serving as an effective alternative detector prior to VLLM response. Last but not least, we find that the two representative evaluation methods for jailbreak often exhibit chance agreement. This limitation makes it potentially misleading when evaluating attack strategies or defense mechanisms. We believe the findings from this paper offer useful insights to rethink the foundational development of VLLM safety with respect to benchmark datasets, defense strategies, and evaluation methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_08410
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The VLLM Safety Paradox: Dual Ease in Jailbreak Attack and Defense
Guo, Yangyang
Jiao, Fangkai
Nie, Liqiang
Kankanhalli, Mohan
Cryptography and Security
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The vulnerability of Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) to jailbreak attacks appears as no surprise. However, recent defense mechanisms against these attacks have reached near-saturation performance on benchmark evaluations, often with minimal effort. This \emph{dual high performance} in both attack and defense raises a fundamental and perplexing paradox. To gain a deep understanding of this issue and thus further help strengthen the trustworthiness of VLLMs, this paper makes three key contributions: i) One tentative explanation for VLLMs being prone to jailbreak attacks--\textbf{inclusion of vision inputs}, as well as its in-depth analysis. ii) The recognition of a largely ignored problem in existing defense mechanisms--\textbf{over-prudence}. The problem causes these defense methods to exhibit unintended abstention, even in the presence of benign inputs, thereby undermining their reliability in faithfully defending against attacks. iii) A simple safety-aware method--\textbf{LLM-Pipeline}. Our method repurposes the more advanced guardrails of LLMs on the shelf, serving as an effective alternative detector prior to VLLM response. Last but not least, we find that the two representative evaluation methods for jailbreak often exhibit chance agreement. This limitation makes it potentially misleading when evaluating attack strategies or defense mechanisms. We believe the findings from this paper offer useful insights to rethink the foundational development of VLLM safety with respect to benchmark datasets, defense strategies, and evaluation methods.
title The VLLM Safety Paradox: Dual Ease in Jailbreak Attack and Defense
topic Cryptography and Security
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08410