MetaCipher: A Time-Persistent and Universal Multi-Agent Framework for Cipher-Based Jailbreak Attacks for LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Boyuan, Shao, Minghao, Basit, Abdul, Garg, Siddharth, Shafique, Muhammad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Chen, Boyuan
Shao, Minghao
Basit, Abdul
Garg, Siddharth
Shafique, Muhammad
author_facet Chen, Boyuan
Shao, Minghao
Basit, Abdul
Garg, Siddharth
Shafique, Muhammad
contents As large language models (LLMs) grow more capable, they face growing vulnerability to sophisticated jailbreak attacks. While developers invest heavily in alignment finetuning and safety guardrails, researchers continue publishing novel attacks, driving progress through adversarial iteration. This dynamic mirrors a strategic game of continual evolution. However, two major challenges hinder jailbreak development: the high cost of querying top-tier LLMs and the short lifespan of effective attacks due to frequent safety updates. These factors limit cost-efficiency and practical impact of research in jailbreak attacks. To address this, we propose MetaCipher, a low-cost, multi-agent jailbreak framework that generalizes across LLMs with varying safety measures. Using reinforcement learning, MetaCipher is modular and adaptive, supporting extensibility to future strategies. Within as few as 10 queries, MetaCipher achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates on recent malicious prompt benchmarks, outperforming prior jailbreak methods. We conduct a large-scale empirical evaluation across diverse victim models and benchmarks, demonstrating its robustness and adaptability. Warning: This paper contains model outputs that may be offensive or harmful, shown solely to demonstrate jailbreak efficacy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_22557
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MetaCipher: A Time-Persistent and Universal Multi-Agent Framework for Cipher-Based Jailbreak Attacks for LLMs
Chen, Boyuan
Shao, Minghao
Basit, Abdul
Garg, Siddharth
Shafique, Muhammad
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
As large language models (LLMs) grow more capable, they face growing vulnerability to sophisticated jailbreak attacks. While developers invest heavily in alignment finetuning and safety guardrails, researchers continue publishing novel attacks, driving progress through adversarial iteration. This dynamic mirrors a strategic game of continual evolution. However, two major challenges hinder jailbreak development: the high cost of querying top-tier LLMs and the short lifespan of effective attacks due to frequent safety updates. These factors limit cost-efficiency and practical impact of research in jailbreak attacks. To address this, we propose MetaCipher, a low-cost, multi-agent jailbreak framework that generalizes across LLMs with varying safety measures. Using reinforcement learning, MetaCipher is modular and adaptive, supporting extensibility to future strategies. Within as few as 10 queries, MetaCipher achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates on recent malicious prompt benchmarks, outperforming prior jailbreak methods. We conduct a large-scale empirical evaluation across diverse victim models and benchmarks, demonstrating its robustness and adaptability. Warning: This paper contains model outputs that may be offensive or harmful, shown solely to demonstrate jailbreak efficacy.
title MetaCipher: A Time-Persistent and Universal Multi-Agent Framework for Cipher-Based Jailbreak Attacks for LLMs
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22557